Alvin Ng

Redshirts has got to be one of the most geek-friendly book titles I have encountered. The uninformed might guess that it's about wearing a certain colour of clothing, and they might be wondering why it's a single compound word. However, any sci-fi fan worth his salt knows that it actually refers to the laughable tendency for characters on the original Star Trek series who wore red uniforms to be entirely expendable and prone to being hurt or killed on away missions. So we know what this story is going to be about. The story of Ensign Andrew Dahl is clearly set in a copy of the Star Trek universe with its starship Intrepid and Universal Union as clear analogues to the starship Enterprise and the Federation. Nevertheless, Redshirts is not merely a spoof of Star Trek, but attempts to tell its own very “meta” story. When Dahl arrives aboard the Intrepid, it doesn't take him long to notice that certain people are dying on missions (and in gruesome, ridiculous ways such as “death by ice shark”), while others never get hurt or seem to recover miraculously when they do. The behaviour of certain crew members changes without explanation and other reality-defying incidents start to pique Dahl's interest, so he starts digging for answers — hopefully before he falls prey to whatever is happening as well. Because of the obvious Star Trek comparisons, we same sci-fi fans who are worth our salt can also predict quite easily what is going on, so thankfully, author John Scalzi doesn't keep that a “mystery” for long. Instead, partway into the story, the plot takes a huge “meta” twist and the fictional reality kind of wraps in on itself. I don't want to give too much away (maybe I already have), but this twist makes the story pretty interesting (a cool little variant on the time-travel story — another sci-fi staple). This plot change also comes right at the time when I was getting very confused by the various characters and their names. (I listened to the audiobook, which was wonderfully performed by Wesley Crusher himself, Wil Wheaton — How's that for “meta”? — but that made it even harder to keep characters straight since they all sounded similar until the story started to focus on a small away-mission crew instead.) The writing style is very light and humourous — and not particularly literary. In fact, we don't delve too deeply into the characters' minds or motives. There isn't even very much description. It's essentially all plot and dialogue (much like a TV script would be). In many ways, this story feels like an episode of Star Trek (or better yet, an epic, two-part episode — maybe even a cliffhanger season finale). Everything moves along rather briskly. After the end of the main story there are several long epilogues which add layers of emotion and character to this story, but it seems weird to relegate them to the post-script. It may have slowed down the pace of the plot, but I would have preferred if that kind of depth could have been a part of the main story all along. In the end, there's not much I can say about this book. It's fun for anyone who is familiar with and enjoys Star Trek and other similar space shows but for anyone outside the fandom I think there is probably not nearly as much here to hold their interest. Thankfully, though I am not a fan of the original Trek, I do enjoy everything that came after — and that includes this book. (4 out of 5)

3 stars

I had high expectations for Mexican-Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia's acclaimed novel, but was pretty let down. Given the book's title, yes, there was everything classically gothic, but very little Mexican, aside from the geographic setting (and the occasional Spanish word). This tale of a rich city girl going out to a country mansion to rescue her married cousin after receiving a disturbing letter about her seeing ghosts and being unwell could have been set anywhere. I thought there'd be something connected to the Mexican indigenous culture, or maybe the some local mythology or folklore, but none of that was in the story. On the contrary, there was a decaying gothic mansion; rich aristocrats from England who are creepy, mean and strict; ghostly and strange nightmares; misty countryside (even in Mexico); and sickly, bedridden characters with mysterious ailments. Into that classic template, drop Noemí Taboada even though she's not a very traditional Mexican. She's a chic modern rich girl who enjoys her nightlife even more than her graduate education in anthropology.

When Noemí goes to High Place to rescue her cousin, Catalina, the story unfolds fairly predictably. There is almost no surprise. Will Noemi find something strange and creepy with the Doyle family? Will Noemí find that there is something to her cousin's delusions about ghosts? Will the Doyle family have unnecessarily strict rules about what Noemi can and cannot do? Will Noemi try to break those rules? Will something dark be secretly lurking at High Place? Will this family turn out to be more bizarre and twisted than they seem? I don't need to answer a single one of those questions for you. You can answer them yourself already.

Noemi was not a standout character. I don't think we knew her very well, despite hearing about her backstory a bit, and constantly hearing her thoughts. Being a pretty debutante, I expected her to play against trope, not be shallow, but actually possess a lot of buried strength and depth. Sadly she didn't really feel like that. Don't get me wrong, Moreno-Garcia's writing isn't bad. She was able to provide fairly vivid descriptions and painted every scene with an appropriately decaying sense of beauty, but I also don't feel she really flexed any extraordinary amount of imagination in word or idea.

The narrator was also mixed. Her performance in the characters's voices was pretty expressive, given how serious most of the characters were. Unfortunately, her English accent needed work. Plus, whenever she went into her narrator voice, she got kind of stilted and pronounced everything with an extremely even tone, I even suspected to be AI a couple of times. That really kind of flattened the mood (and in a gothic tale, the mood is half the story).

As I mentioned at the start, this novel was overall quite disappointing. I like my creepy Lovecraftian horror and my gothic tales, but this one was middling.

Do you often feel like computers have it in for you? Do you fear that the more technology advances, the more it's going to take over our lives? I don't really share those sentiments, but after reading Daniel H. Wilson's novel Robopocalypse, I did start to look at all the gadgetry in my daily life and think about what would happen if they turned against us. In this book, the story is broken into a large number of diverse storylines and time periods all centred around the moment that a massive artificial intelligence called “Archos” takes over all the robots in the world (and in this world, civilization has advanced enough to have all kinds of different robots around). The first few chapters read like an anthology of various incidents that foreshadow the rise of the machines: from the violent attack of a domestic service robot in a frozen yogurt shop, to the creepy and threatening words of a child's electronic dolls. These early episodes set the groundwork for the rest of the novel which jumps from one character's situation to the next as humans are defeated, then rise up against the robots that threaten to destroy their entire race.

As you might imagine, there's a bit of a military overtone to a lot of the chapters. Some of the narrators are members of the military or militia, and of course the whole context of the novel is a human-robot war, so there are going to be battle scenes and battle language. Unfortunately I don't really enjoy military narration. Often writers try hard to express a military character's persona by making them very gruff, loud, or simplistic in their sense of right and wrong. There is a single, overall narrator named Cormac Wallace who comments on each of the other sub-narrators and though he wasn't originally in the military, he led the militia group who ended up defeating Archos, so his developed “roughneck”-style voice is throughout. While the other characters vary widely in demographics, one of the deficiencies of this book is that they start to sound a bit too similar in tone. The child characters don't really speak like children. Their descriptions and accounts of their remembered thoughts don't use language that necessarily fit what they're supposed to be (these narrations supposedly come from the characters either personally recounting their anecdotes or surveillance from robots who've recorded events with their sensors). The language seems like a novel, and a verbose one at that. For example, here's a gruesome account of a man being attacked by robots:

Tiberius is heaving, muscles spasming, kicking up clumps of bloodstained snow. Mist pours off his sweating 250-pound frame as the East African thrashes violently, flat on his back. He's the biggest, most fearless grunt in the squad, but none of that matters when a glinting nightmare flashes out of the swirling snow and begins eating him alive.

The Electric State tells the story of a runaway teenager, Michelle, and her drone robot buddy, Skip, driving across an eerie, abandoned alternate USA in 1997, where ruins of the previously thriving consumer culture can still be seen alongside massive derelict war vehicles left over from a cybernetic conflict. It's a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the zombies aren't a result of dark magic or contagion, but some kind of “neuronic” technology that linked peoples' minds and stole their souls.

The art book is filled with beautifully haunting paintings of scenes encountered by the pair on their journey towards the west coast. It's amazing how Stålenhag can make such mundane images of American highways, cars, ordinary buildings look so sad and creepy – even when monuments of high technology are injected in between. The masterful part is how the visuals and the text come together. Accompanied by the visuals, the narrative is a well-written, tragic character story. Everything that Michelle has already gone through, as told in flashbacks, is sad. But it also feels like her life was the norm and that the shiny plastic veneer of this society was easily scratched away. Despite the setup for a road trip adventure, the plot involves almost no action apart from driving from stop to stop. Stålenhag's writing is excellent at evoking a mood of decay and abandonment, and he gives Michelle's voice a feeling of weariness, even though she also feels determined against the backdrop of the rest of the world that has given up, dissipated and disappeared.

A challenge in reading this book is that it doesn't really hold your hand. The writing is subtle about when the voice or timeframe has changed (though there are typographical cues – which makes me feel bad for the audiobook readers, and they're also missing out on the visuals, which are the best part). Michelle's narration often switches between past and present without warning. Plus, the backstory of this alternate world requires some puzzling together of various snapshots (along with visual clues from the illustrations). The book is never a sunny funny read, but it also stops short of being depressing. It stirs up all kinds of feelings, especially if the reader manages to engage with Michelle and Skip's story (including the finale told only in images – which I confess I loved, but am not sure I understood completely). This is that kind of book. (4 out of 5)

It's essentially the story of a science professor whose life gets turned upside down when the multiverse of alternate realities intrudes on his idyllic family life. Think Everything Everywhere All At Once (only worse).

I didn't love the writing, which I thought tried to make everything intense by using overwrought, superlative-laden, movie poster language (Come on, protagonist, was that really the longest shower of your life?)

Also, the science in the sci-fi was pretty weak (which is only exacerbated by the fact that the protagonist was supposed to be this super-genius level scientist who is constantly trying to explain the multiverse to us, and the other characters). It would be less bad if they didn't keep reminding us that every possible thing that can happen causes branching realities to an infinite degree, and then make it so that they (and other characters) can relatively easily navigate between realities (or are really fixated on specific versions of reality).

Bottom line is that I could barely finish the book. It was pretty frustrating. Comparing Dark Matter to Project Hail Mary (which is also popcorn sci-fi), the latter was a million times better! (see, I can use superlatives too!)