Kim Miller
Added to listOwnedwith 5 books.
A rollicking end to the Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy. Everyone's favourite cigar smoking gun toting brain enhanced foul mouthed monkey with attitude saves the world ... for the third time.
#1 saw him save the world from a nuclear holocaust. #2 saw him save the world from an attack of a hive mind cult called The Gestalt. And in #3 he saves the world from the attack of the evil mastermind behind the previous threats who wants another attempt at global destruction. No assimilated hive mind this time, just cyborgs where the brains of humans have been removed and put into metal robots. We've moved from Star Trek's Borg to Dr.Who's Cybermen.
And through it all, the brain enhancements, the hive mind cloning, the cyborgs, Powell weaves a story that takes the idea of 'life and existence is just a simulation' and shakes it out of its packaging and spills the pieces all over the floor so he can put them back together as he sees fit.
A non-stop story that gets really bonkers towards the end.
A rollicking end to the Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy. Everyone's favourite cigar smoking gun toting brain enhanced foul mouthed monkey with attitude saves the world ... for the third time.
#1 saw him save the world from a nuclear holocaust. #2 saw him save the world from an attack of a hive mind cult called The Gestalt. And in #3 he saves the world from the attack of the evil mastermind behind the previous threats who wants another attempt at global destruction. No assimilated hive mind this time, just cyborgs where the brains of humans have been removed and put into metal robots. We've moved from Star Trek's Borg to Dr.Who's Cybermen.
And through it all, the brain enhancements, the hive mind cloning, the cyborgs, Powell weaves a story that takes the idea of 'life and existence is just a simulation' and shakes it out of its packaging and spills the pieces all over the floor so he can put them back together as he sees fit.
A non-stop story that gets really bonkers towards the end.
Book #2 in the Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy. In #1 they saved the world from a nuclear disaster, here they save the world from a parallel universe hive mind attack.
A science fiction author is shot at by some stranger and almost immediately almost blown up with a car bomb. He goes on the run and ends up on the giant airship Tereschova with the crew. He wakes up to find a copy of himself standing in his cabin who is dying from a gunshot wound.
Ack-Ack is called to the captain's cabin where a man from the mysterious Gestalt organisation/cult wants to recruit him. He attacks the man and sends him away. And suddenly things get crazy. The author's long dead wife appears along with their 16 year old daughter who was never born because of a miscarriage. She tries to explain that his science fiction books on parallel universes etc were not fiction but a reality that was slowly shaping his unconscious mind.
And so the mayhem starts. Gestalt wants the author dead and wants Ack-Ack recruited into the hive mind cult. They kidnap K8, Ack-Ack's teenage computer hacker sidekick. An attack on Earth begins with parallel people appearing in unexpected places. And with his cigar in his mouth and a gun in each hand Ack-Ack goes on the offensive. The real surprise comes when he finds out who is leading Gestalt, until that surprise is taken over by another twist in the narrative.
It ends with Ack-Ack pulling the team together and seeing further possibilities of taking his mayhem to new places.
Book #2 in the Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy. In #1 they saved the world from a nuclear disaster, here they save the world from a parallel universe hive mind attack.
A science fiction author is shot at by some stranger and almost immediately almost blown up with a car bomb. He goes on the run and ends up on the giant airship Tereschova with the crew. He wakes up to find a copy of himself standing in his cabin who is dying from a gunshot wound.
Ack-Ack is called to the captain's cabin where a man from the mysterious Gestalt organisation/cult wants to recruit him. He attacks the man and sends him away. And suddenly things get crazy. The author's long dead wife appears along with their 16 year old daughter who was never born because of a miscarriage. She tries to explain that his science fiction books on parallel universes etc were not fiction but a reality that was slowly shaping his unconscious mind.
And so the mayhem starts. Gestalt wants the author dead and wants Ack-Ack recruited into the hive mind cult. They kidnap K8, Ack-Ack's teenage computer hacker sidekick. An attack on Earth begins with parallel people appearing in unexpected places. And with his cigar in his mouth and a gun in each hand Ack-Ack goes on the offensive. The real surprise comes when he finds out who is leading Gestalt, until that surprise is taken over by another twist in the narrative.
It ends with Ack-Ack pulling the team together and seeing further possibilities of taking his mayhem to new places.
The final of Crouch's Wayward Pines trilogy. Ethan has told the townsfolk of Pilcher's deception and Pilcher turns on them all. He turns off the electric fence and locks the gate open so the abbies can get into town. They attack and the people split into three parties and try to escape through tunnels and up into the cavern way up the cliff. Not everybody makes it.
Ethan manages to get inside the control bunker and finds Pilcher drunk, morose and violently angry. Once Ethan shows the video of Pilcher murdering his own daughter they turn against him. There is a rush to save anybody left down in the town.
Adam Hassler, Ethan's former boss and the one who first sent him into Wayward Pines returns from three years exploring the outside world, looking for some hope of other people surviving. He was also Ethan's replacement husband/father before being sent out, after which Ethan was revived from cryosleep. The dynamic between Hassler and Ethan form a major theme of this book.
Once he's into the control systems Ethan discovers that there is sufficient food for only another four years. The abbies have killed the cattle and the winters are too fierce for anything to grow. Either the people leave in the hope of traveling south to warmer places or they starve. So a final plan is put into place.
The final of Crouch's Wayward Pines trilogy. Ethan has told the townsfolk of Pilcher's deception and Pilcher turns on them all. He turns off the electric fence and locks the gate open so the abbies can get into town. They attack and the people split into three parties and try to escape through tunnels and up into the cavern way up the cliff. Not everybody makes it.
Ethan manages to get inside the control bunker and finds Pilcher drunk, morose and violently angry. Once Ethan shows the video of Pilcher murdering his own daughter they turn against him. There is a rush to save anybody left down in the town.
Adam Hassler, Ethan's former boss and the one who first sent him into Wayward Pines returns from three years exploring the outside world, looking for some hope of other people surviving. He was also Ethan's replacement husband/father before being sent out, after which Ethan was revived from cryosleep. The dynamic between Hassler and Ethan form a major theme of this book.
Once he's into the control systems Ethan discovers that there is sufficient food for only another four years. The abbies have killed the cattle and the winters are too fierce for anything to grow. Either the people leave in the hope of traveling south to warmer places or they starve. So a final plan is put into place.
A collection of short stories on post humanism, and what might happen if the far future is populated by robots who don't remember the existence of humans. I thought the stories to have a weird edge but as I got further into them they started to form a more cohesive theme. The writing style and thought processes probably highlight a Korean manner that I found difficult to engage with until about half way into the book.
Firstly there is a short dissertation on the nature of breasts. It's something of a metaphor for 'some people write SF and some don't.'
There's a story about a person in a role playing game, trying to figure out if he's really human. A story about the nature of time passing, and the incongruity of thinking of time travel. The author asserts that there will never be time travel into the past simply because there has never been anyone from the future who has come back to warn us about anything. And then the stories form an exploration into evolution and the vagaries of the evolutionary process.
A story of evolution so rapid that in a single lifetime humans will evolve into totally different forms and species. And the titular story, On The Origin of Species, in which far future robots in a university discuss the mad notion that organic life can even exist. The planet is in an ice age caused by a massive black cloud that blankets the Earth, smoke from the factories that recycle old robots into new robots. The final story follows this theme with a 'What might have been' exploration of not only organic life being discovered and grown in the lab, but human life forms. This is a conflict ridden piece as the main character recognises that building these 'unnatural' beings threatens the world of robots. It's a reversal of Asimov's I Robot story.
A collection of short stories on post humanism, and what might happen if the far future is populated by robots who don't remember the existence of humans. I thought the stories to have a weird edge but as I got further into them they started to form a more cohesive theme. The writing style and thought processes probably highlight a Korean manner that I found difficult to engage with until about half way into the book.
Firstly there is a short dissertation on the nature of breasts. It's something of a metaphor for 'some people write SF and some don't.'
There's a story about a person in a role playing game, trying to figure out if he's really human. A story about the nature of time passing, and the incongruity of thinking of time travel. The author asserts that there will never be time travel into the past simply because there has never been anyone from the future who has come back to warn us about anything. And then the stories form an exploration into evolution and the vagaries of the evolutionary process.
A story of evolution so rapid that in a single lifetime humans will evolve into totally different forms and species. And the titular story, On The Origin of Species, in which far future robots in a university discuss the mad notion that organic life can even exist. The planet is in an ice age caused by a massive black cloud that blankets the Earth, smoke from the factories that recycle old robots into new robots. The final story follows this theme with a 'What might have been' exploration of not only organic life being discovered and grown in the lab, but human life forms. This is a conflict ridden piece as the main character recognises that building these 'unnatural' beings threatens the world of robots. It's a reversal of Asimov's I Robot story.
A giant monster is discovered sleeping at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by a sunken city. It can only be the result of an alien race. Radiation kills the first explorers and only a submarine camera can get close enough to examine it. Once the videos are screened around the world society goes crazy in what becomes known as 'the collapse'. It takes two years for the volatile social and political disruptions to start settling out. By that time a single international government is forming and a research station that floats above the monster is envisioned and designed.
Into that world several people's lives start to interact. The book is largely taken up with the origin stories of these characters. There is a scientist working on artificial intelligence. There is his strangely talented assistant, a young woman who grew up in a Mexican orphanage and supported by an equally strange nun. There is a teenager who is deposited by a violent chauffeur in the care of an old Nazi in South America as his parents die in the collapse, but works his way into the orbit of these others. And along with the Nazi there is a really weird man with some kind of prescience when dealing with others, but who never speaks.
The book splits into parts that deal with the backstory of each character as well as a continuing narrative of the computer scientist and his development of forms of what he calls artificial life. In reality they are characters simulated by an AI who spontaneously start to evolve, giving themselves faces and personalities. The hope is that they will evolve to the point of offering insight in how to deal with the monster.
And underneath all this is the powerful media magnate with the money and power to pay for it all but also to claim control over it when it suits him. This man's assistant turns out to be the estranged daughter of the computer scientist. Yep, connections all over the place.
This story/backstory shaping of the book continues right up to the final action. There will be a conference on establishing the floating research station and for different reasons most of these people are present. But watching over it all are the weird non-vocal man and the violent chauffeur. They meet in a lecture hall at the university and watch the conference proceedings on the video screens along the wall. But they don't just watch as suddenly we are thrust into a scene of cosmic horror. These two are aliens, or more likely alien gods, one trying to keep the monster asleep to protect the Earth, the other to throw everything into chaos for his own delight. They don't just watch, the chaos god acts through the screens to attack the people who the other one has carefully placed into each other's orbit to keep the Earth protected.
This is book #1 of a series. It ends with a bang and with the unspoken sub-note, 'That's the end of the setup. More to follow.'
The writing is fast paced in many places and a bit draggy in others where the backstories seem to have little bearing on the plot. The changes of POV and writing form (omnipotent narrator here and personal diary notes there) take some adjustment. And the number of characters who are introduced into the backstory elements sometimes don't appear in the main plot until much later and it's almost as if this new character is unrelated to the earlier origin story. It's a book that almost needs a notepad beside it to keep track of the people for when they reappear late in the story.
It the first novel from this father, mother, son team and is an ambitious undertaking that holds itself well in the genre.
A giant monster is discovered sleeping at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by a sunken city. It can only be the result of an alien race. Radiation kills the first explorers and only a submarine camera can get close enough to examine it. Once the videos are screened around the world society goes crazy in what becomes known as 'the collapse'. It takes two years for the volatile social and political disruptions to start settling out. By that time a single international government is forming and a research station that floats above the monster is envisioned and designed.
Into that world several people's lives start to interact. The book is largely taken up with the origin stories of these characters. There is a scientist working on artificial intelligence. There is his strangely talented assistant, a young woman who grew up in a Mexican orphanage and supported by an equally strange nun. There is a teenager who is deposited by a violent chauffeur in the care of an old Nazi in South America as his parents die in the collapse, but works his way into the orbit of these others. And along with the Nazi there is a really weird man with some kind of prescience when dealing with others, but who never speaks.
The book splits into parts that deal with the backstory of each character as well as a continuing narrative of the computer scientist and his development of forms of what he calls artificial life. In reality they are characters simulated by an AI who spontaneously start to evolve, giving themselves faces and personalities. The hope is that they will evolve to the point of offering insight in how to deal with the monster.
And underneath all this is the powerful media magnate with the money and power to pay for it all but also to claim control over it when it suits him. This man's assistant turns out to be the estranged daughter of the computer scientist. Yep, connections all over the place.
This story/backstory shaping of the book continues right up to the final action. There will be a conference on establishing the floating research station and for different reasons most of these people are present. But watching over it all are the weird non-vocal man and the violent chauffeur. They meet in a lecture hall at the university and watch the conference proceedings on the video screens along the wall. But they don't just watch as suddenly we are thrust into a scene of cosmic horror. These two are aliens, or more likely alien gods, one trying to keep the monster asleep to protect the Earth, the other to throw everything into chaos for his own delight. They don't just watch, the chaos god acts through the screens to attack the people who the other one has carefully placed into each other's orbit to keep the Earth protected.
This is book #1 of a series. It ends with a bang and with the unspoken sub-note, 'That's the end of the setup. More to follow.'
The writing is fast paced in many places and a bit draggy in others where the backstories seem to have little bearing on the plot. The changes of POV and writing form (omnipotent narrator here and personal diary notes there) take some adjustment. And the number of characters who are introduced into the backstory elements sometimes don't appear in the main plot until much later and it's almost as if this new character is unrelated to the earlier origin story. It's a book that almost needs a notepad beside it to keep track of the people for when they reappear late in the story.
It the first novel from this father, mother, son team and is an ambitious undertaking that holds itself well in the genre.