Kim Miller
Updated a reading goal:
Read 75 books in 2025
Progress so far: 25 / 75 33%
A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.
Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.
There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.
It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.
A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.
Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.
There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.
It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.
Jason considers himself fortunate. He has a beautiful wife and teenage son and life generally is good to him. One night walking home from drinks with friends a man pushes a gun into the back of his head. He's abducted, stripped, injected with something and blacks out. He wakes up strapped to a gurney with people he's never met greeting him like an old friend. This is no longer his world.
He finds himself in a lab with strange things happening. He recovers some semblance of normal and goes home but his house is empty, and there is no sign that his wife or son ever lived there. The lab people bring him back and he finds that he's a celebrated nuclear physicist who has managed to understand and control quantum superposition. And that's when the real trouble starts.
Jason goes on a wild ride through alternative parallel worlds, trying to get back to his own home. It's here that the novel threatens to break down into a travelogue of landscapes, each with its own catastrophe. Crouch pulls it back from the brink and Jason figures our how to 'drive' the system some other version of himself has created.
The final part of the book is getting back to his wife and son and trying to escape a multitude of parallel Jasons, each one desperate to be the one 'real' husband and father.
The book is let down by the constant exposition of quantum theory, superposition, parallel worlds, parallel lives, and parallel people. There is a lot of 'Jason-splaining' going on. The characters are up to the task although some of the dialogue gets a bit cheesy. I suppose telling one version of your husband why another version of him is better or worse than the one in front of her is a bit tricky. The final resolution, their escape, opens up the possibility of a further novel but I hope Crouch does not take that bait. The would be too much what Netflix would do.
Jason considers himself fortunate. He has a beautiful wife and teenage son and life generally is good to him. One night walking home from drinks with friends a man pushes a gun into the back of his head. He's abducted, stripped, injected with something and blacks out. He wakes up strapped to a gurney with people he's never met greeting him like an old friend. This is no longer his world.
He finds himself in a lab with strange things happening. He recovers some semblance of normal and goes home but his house is empty, and there is no sign that his wife or son ever lived there. The lab people bring him back and he finds that he's a celebrated nuclear physicist who has managed to understand and control quantum superposition. And that's when the real trouble starts.
Jason goes on a wild ride through alternative parallel worlds, trying to get back to his own home. It's here that the novel threatens to break down into a travelogue of landscapes, each with its own catastrophe. Crouch pulls it back from the brink and Jason figures our how to 'drive' the system some other version of himself has created.
The final part of the book is getting back to his wife and son and trying to escape a multitude of parallel Jasons, each one desperate to be the one 'real' husband and father.
The book is let down by the constant exposition of quantum theory, superposition, parallel worlds, parallel lives, and parallel people. There is a lot of 'Jason-splaining' going on. The characters are up to the task although some of the dialogue gets a bit cheesy. I suppose telling one version of your husband why another version of him is better or worse than the one in front of her is a bit tricky. The final resolution, their escape, opens up the possibility of a further novel but I hope Crouch does not take that bait. The would be too much what Netflix would do.
A very fitting end to the story started in Daemon. Suarez serves us up a non-stop assault on our senses and imagination of a 'three front war'. One one front is the Daemon, the AI that is disrupting end-stage capitalism. The second front is the emerging social movement as ordinary people start to join it and force a new egalitarian society. And the third front is the combined might of the oligarchs and moneyed class alongside a secretly complicit government.
The action starts on the first few pages and is relentless through the novel. It's seductive and almost magnetic in how it holds the reader's attention. My son and I have a rating system for action movies. It either gets a pass or a "Not enough exploding helicopters." This book has not only exploding helicopters but robotically controlled killer cars, riderless motorcycles swinging murderous rotating blades, avatars that can walk out of an online game and into real life, and lots of high tech stuff for those wondering how imaginative Suarez can get in one book. Very definitely a pass.
There are lots of scenes of over the top violence that leave scattered body parts, but lets face it, noone takes over the world without a trail of dismembered arms and legs. His VR headsets and the accompanying online world of the followers of the Daemon are way beyond their day when this book appeared. And there will be those who consider the political conversations and viewpoints scattered throughout are preachy, but they sit well in the overall story, especially considering that state of federal politics of the US in 2025.
All that remains is for somebody to pick up a bunch of funding and turn these two books into a top tier movie.
A very fitting end to the story started in Daemon. Suarez serves us up a non-stop assault on our senses and imagination of a 'three front war'. One one front is the Daemon, the AI that is disrupting end-stage capitalism. The second front is the emerging social movement as ordinary people start to join it and force a new egalitarian society. And the third front is the combined might of the oligarchs and moneyed class alongside a secretly complicit government.
The action starts on the first few pages and is relentless through the novel. It's seductive and almost magnetic in how it holds the reader's attention. My son and I have a rating system for action movies. It either gets a pass or a "Not enough exploding helicopters." This book has not only exploding helicopters but robotically controlled killer cars, riderless motorcycles swinging murderous rotating blades, avatars that can walk out of an online game and into real life, and lots of high tech stuff for those wondering how imaginative Suarez can get in one book. Very definitely a pass.
There are lots of scenes of over the top violence that leave scattered body parts, but lets face it, noone takes over the world without a trail of dismembered arms and legs. His VR headsets and the accompanying online world of the followers of the Daemon are way beyond their day when this book appeared. And there will be those who consider the political conversations and viewpoints scattered throughout are preachy, but they sit well in the overall story, especially considering that state of federal politics of the US in 2025.
All that remains is for somebody to pick up a bunch of funding and turn these two books into a top tier movie.
The 'out of controlness' of HAL meets the bloodlust of The Kingsman movies and ends up with a car chase/crash scene that rivals The Blues Brothers. This would have been SF when it was written twenty years ago but the computer development since then puts it into the techno-thriller genre with a political edge.
Billionaire computer game develop, Matthew Sobol, has spawned a distributed artificial intelligence network across the internet that is triggered on his death. The 'Daemon' sets in motion a slow burn revolution designed to undermine and take down the corporate industrial complex and in its place set up a system of equality. The daemon runs on the internet on tracks built into two of the online multi-player games that Sobol developed. Because it's not sitting on servers as identifiable code it can't be located. Recruitment happens among gamers who are disaffected young men who can be manipulated or attracted into taking part.
There is no lack of characters, sometimes too many to remember, and some of them are running assumed names and changing identities to infiltrate the govt agency that has been set up to fight the daemon. Dialogue is functional rather than relational, the pace of the action is fast and sometimes seductive, and sometimes it's confusing about who is alive and who is dead. There are some scenes of misogyny that Suarez would probably not include in 2025, or at least would modify.
Overall this action packed book is a good fast read. It is the first of a pair and it ends at a good point as long as the reader knows it's only the first half of the story. Most of it is enjoyable in the way of an action movie that we like but after it's over we go and buy pizza and life goes on. I'm happy to move straight into book 2, Freedom.
The 'out of controlness' of HAL meets the bloodlust of The Kingsman movies and ends up with a car chase/crash scene that rivals The Blues Brothers. This would have been SF when it was written twenty years ago but the computer development since then puts it into the techno-thriller genre with a political edge.
Billionaire computer game develop, Matthew Sobol, has spawned a distributed artificial intelligence network across the internet that is triggered on his death. The 'Daemon' sets in motion a slow burn revolution designed to undermine and take down the corporate industrial complex and in its place set up a system of equality. The daemon runs on the internet on tracks built into two of the online multi-player games that Sobol developed. Because it's not sitting on servers as identifiable code it can't be located. Recruitment happens among gamers who are disaffected young men who can be manipulated or attracted into taking part.
There is no lack of characters, sometimes too many to remember, and some of them are running assumed names and changing identities to infiltrate the govt agency that has been set up to fight the daemon. Dialogue is functional rather than relational, the pace of the action is fast and sometimes seductive, and sometimes it's confusing about who is alive and who is dead. There are some scenes of misogyny that Suarez would probably not include in 2025, or at least would modify.
Overall this action packed book is a good fast read. It is the first of a pair and it ends at a good point as long as the reader knows it's only the first half of the story. Most of it is enjoyable in the way of an action movie that we like but after it's over we go and buy pizza and life goes on. I'm happy to move straight into book 2, Freedom.
Not just a time travel book.
A man is shown a portal back into 1958 but no matter how long you stay in the past, the portal always brings you back to two minutes after left in the present. The man who shows it to him had tried to stop the assassination of JFK but became too ill and came back to find somebody else to take on the task. So Jake takes Al's comprehensive notes of the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and goes back to stop him.
Jake does a test run, preventing a different tragedy that effected a friend of his in his distant childhood. He returns to find unexpected consequences for changing that kid's life. A twist of this portal is that each time you go back in time it resets all your changes back to the original, so he goes back to find a different way to save his friend, and to stay there from 1958 to 1963 and stop Oswald.
We get a look at the horrors of life for many people in the southern US states in that era, the racism, the sexism, the poverty. And Jake meets a pretty woman and his life of tracking Oswald gets intertwined with a love story. Once again Jake imagines he can do another reset and fix a tragedy in this woman's life, but it means starting the whole thing over again.
He also discovers that 'the past does not want to be changed' as things suddenly pop up to prevent him from taking the next planned step. And he finds 'harmonies' as other things repeat. 'That car is the same as the car in another city'. That kind of coincidence. Trouble is, sometimes that car really is the car from an earlier encounter.
As the day 11.22.63 approaches things speed up. There is more disruption and the day itself becomes totally chaotic.
No spoilers here, but a few days after everything is over Jake finds his way back to the portal. It's changed after the five years he's been in the past. And when he at last gets back to the present he finds a dystopian world of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown and violence.
That past the didn't want to be changed? It meant business.
Not just a time travel book.
A man is shown a portal back into 1958 but no matter how long you stay in the past, the portal always brings you back to two minutes after left in the present. The man who shows it to him had tried to stop the assassination of JFK but became too ill and came back to find somebody else to take on the task. So Jake takes Al's comprehensive notes of the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and goes back to stop him.
Jake does a test run, preventing a different tragedy that effected a friend of his in his distant childhood. He returns to find unexpected consequences for changing that kid's life. A twist of this portal is that each time you go back in time it resets all your changes back to the original, so he goes back to find a different way to save his friend, and to stay there from 1958 to 1963 and stop Oswald.
We get a look at the horrors of life for many people in the southern US states in that era, the racism, the sexism, the poverty. And Jake meets a pretty woman and his life of tracking Oswald gets intertwined with a love story. Once again Jake imagines he can do another reset and fix a tragedy in this woman's life, but it means starting the whole thing over again.
He also discovers that 'the past does not want to be changed' as things suddenly pop up to prevent him from taking the next planned step. And he finds 'harmonies' as other things repeat. 'That car is the same as the car in another city'. That kind of coincidence. Trouble is, sometimes that car really is the car from an earlier encounter.
As the day 11.22.63 approaches things speed up. There is more disruption and the day itself becomes totally chaotic.
No spoilers here, but a few days after everything is over Jake finds his way back to the portal. It's changed after the five years he's been in the past. And when he at last gets back to the present he finds a dystopian world of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown and violence.
That past the didn't want to be changed? It meant business.