Kim Miller

The space capsule Sunbird is on a research trip around the sun but is struck by a massive solar flare. When it comes around the other side and can contact Earth there is no response from Houston. However, soon there is a radio signal from a woman trying to contact somebody else. The confusion takes some time to settle and the three men on Sunbird are told that their mission was never completed, they never returned to Earth, and it is now three hundreds years into the future.

The women are on a space station and they manage to bring the men on board as Sunbird drifts off with no remaining fuel. They are told that a catastrophic pandemic reduced the population of Earth and there are now only two million inhabitants. The narrator, Lorrimer, the Sunbird's doctor, realises that they have been drugged and he's been rambling on, saying aloud everything he's been thinking. As his head clears he realises that their rescue ship is crewed by women only as no males survived the pandemic and Earth's population is made up of cloned women.

Under the influence of the drug, one crewman tries to rape one of the women. The commander, a man of fervent religious faith, tries to take command and says he's Christ's leader as women should not lead. Lorrimer realises that the drug has revealed the inner nature of the two men, and the women can't allow them to live. Then he realises that even though he is a passive personality type the women will not allow him to live either.

This fourth novella ends a story arc on a satisfactory note while also allowing more to follow.

Murderbot brings data drives from the events of book 3 and needs to deliver them to Mensah, his contracted 'boss' from book 1. But it seems she's been kidnapped by the evil mining company at the heart of his troubles. Of course, he sets off on a one man rescue mission. But that would be too simple, he needs a bunch of humans to get in his way, and who better than the old research team from book 1, also trying to get Mensah's release.

This book is much more a police procedural style than earlier books. Murderbot has to plan everything with the team of humans. He's the one with the software interface and multitasking coding ability to get into the computer systems of their various enemies, while at the same time trying to keep his humans alive. In that respect there is a lot more of his thinking in the narrative compared with his actions.

The escape plan works for a bit, doesn't work, works, doesn't work, back and forth. There are several points at which it looks like the whole thing is about to collapse as the mining company has superior fire power and processing ability. The rescue this time has more hopeless seeming moments than in previous books as the stakes are higher.

The ending points to a re-doing of a previous book, which is not good, but then Wells pulls it out and into a totally different direction to end the story. I think Murderbot's surprise moves are getting to her.

Murderbot sees a newscast that suggests the mining company that has caused all his problems was involved with another crime on another planet. He heads off to find out. To get there he needs to be a licensed employee so he takes a position as security consultant with a group of disaffected researches who are trying to get their data back.

Once again, things get very murdery, with him and his employers as the target of battlebots and armed drones. And once again we're in a story of 'getting into danger' and thinking, "How is he going to get out of this?" It's a classic (but shorter) adventure story after authors like Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre, or the Mission Impossible movie series where all the odds are stacked against the protagonist.

The endings of #1 and #2 have had a "you can stop here" feel about them, but this one ends with a very definite pointer to the next book in the series.

Murderbot has been removed from the company inventory and is a free agent. He leaves his people and sets off to find out what really happened in the event in which he thinks he murdered a whole mining team. He links up with another research team as their security consultant as they try to get back some stolen data. He also finds an unexpected friend, but friendship is not something that constructs do and he struggles to form a relationship.

The research team comes under threat, his exploration of his own past reveals further intrigue, and he finds himself helping a sexbot escape.

Comfort food for a rainy day. This is a short novella and a quick read. Murderbot is the security semi organic robot that guards a survey team on a distant planet.Things start to go wrong and Murderbot ultimately fixes things, almost. There are a couple of crisis points where he's (she) is damaged and starts shutting down, but those moments are saved by one or more of the humans. The story is a nice romp of "Who is trying to kill us and why?" with a very satisfying ending that subverts reader expectations and sets us up for further adventures.

A few points.

Murderbot is the name it gives itself after incidents that happen long before this story. What he really wants for himself is to sit quietly in a corner and watch TV shows on his inner digital feed. To that end he's disabled some of the control systems built into his central module and is semi-autonomous.

He/she/it is genderless but, like dogs are always boys and cats are always girls, I see it as a male figure. The others in the story struggle to relate to both his robot element and his organic human element.

The characters is this story are not fleshed out at all. They are two dimensional in most cases. This is probably because the narrator is a robot and does not understand depth of personality or human inner conflict etc.

There is humour here but only of the robot being innocent of the motivations of humans and indifferent to their feelings. He mostly operates in his own little bubble of ironic observation. The story ends with that humour turned on himself as he becomes more human than he would have imagined at the beginning of the book.

The Keeling is a top secret spaceship with some kind of alien backstory. Because it goes into the most dangerous battle situations and has massive crew losses, the crew is mostly made up of criminals serving a two year term in place of their original sentence. And somehow some of them survive their mission.

Shakedown is #1 of a series of not yet published books. The first half is the setup with the many characters being introduced and their histories revealed. The second half is their first mission as they settle in to the strange spaceship and their new crewmates. The characters are either ship crew or Raiders, the on-site marines who do the close up fighting. Of course they hate each other, but then most of the individuals hate everybody else anyway.

It's a fast paced story once it gets going and has lots of violence between crew members until they are forced to act together in battle situations. The long introduction component takes concentration to get through as the backstory of certain characters influences their later actions. And with so many characters things can get lost in the narrative. It also suffers somewhat from the descriptive passages of some parts of the spaceship. We don't really need to know the dimensions of the galley area and how seats are only on one side of the table etc. Same with other areas of the ship. We are already familiar with the general layout of a control deck or navigation table.

The book ends the shakedown mission well enough, and also launches us into a major event that signals that the sequel will start on a big moment.

This is Christopher Priest's first novel. It is a good story overall but suffers from a very laggy first section that stops the story from progressing. It begins with the protagonist working in a secret lab far below the surface of Antarctica, a decision that seems to have been made only for the final stages of the book to have a jumping off point.

Research chemist Wentick is taken from the lab and into the jungles of Brazil where, after a long trek through the jungle, he's incarcerated in an abandoned jail and interrogated. The jail sections takes up 30% of the book and is a long meandering sequence of almost surreal events. Almost, but not quite. The whole section is given no meaning in the story apart from the suggestion of total disorientation. Wentick's captors are quite mad at time while Wentick himself is perfectly rational through it all.

At last he's moved from the 'jail in the jungle' environment and finds himself in Sao Paulo with a sympathetic associate and a new laboratory, except that he's 200 years into the future. There has been a nuclear war that has blown up most of the world and only South America survives without too much damage. It turns out that these future people think Wentick and his research has caused a severe problem that arose in the war and he's been brought into the future to set things right. This is quite a shift from the idea that people go back to the past to correct things.

The second half of the book moves along well and the characters are much more relatable. Wentick goes through a lot of thinking about time displacement as he considers that his wife and children are now long dead and probably didn't survive the war anyway. But with a bit of time travel left to him he makes a very unexpected decision.

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a police officer with The Panoply, the organisation patrolling an association of inhabited asteroids called the Glitterband. Somebody has blown up one of the habitats with the loss of hundreds of lives. Dreyfus is sent to investigate.

The story soon turns into more than a murder investigation. The most obvious suspect looks to have been set up. But by who? And what reason made such loss of life worth it? And so the mysterious presence of Aurora slowly emerges. But Aurora is not the normal super-villain trying to take over the whole of civilisation. Aurora was killed decades ago, and this resurrection speaks of a darker threat.

Very soon Dreyfus finds himself pursuing a distributed AI intent on bringing down the Glitterband's governance. And with more investigation it seems there is a second AI that is looming with a totally different threat to them all.

This is a fast paced story with high stakes and an equally high body count. The attack by Aurora is ruthless, and so must be the response against her. Dreyfus sees a possible ally against Aurora but convincing him to join the war puts him in mortal danger.

The book ends at a suitable point but there is much left to be picked up by a sequel.

I was attracted to this book when I heard a reviewer say. "A man buys a house and finds that it cleans itself and if he leaves the washing up on the kitchen bench overnight it's been done in the morning." And that was my entry point into this very human time travel story.

Tom is the house buyer. He's recently divorced and moved out of town. He buys a house that has been left abandoned by the previous owner who has disappeared without a trace and is ten years missing. The mysterious washing up feature is only one of the strange things he finds. At the heart of the story is time travel.

When he finds himself no longer in the Pacific North West in 1989 but walking out of an apartment building into New York city in 1963 it turns his world upside down. We meet the other characters that populate the story. The estate agent who sold him the house, the helpful young woman who finds him sitting dazed in New York, her friends who live for folk songs and poetry in smoke filled cafes and sing of justice and peace, and somewhere in the shadows is a dark force who seeks his death.

This is not a time travel story of a man on a quest, he's not trying to 'fix' some event of history. It's not a hard science fiction exploration as if Wilson is saying, "I've got this idea about time travel, what do you think of it?" It's a thriller built loosely around a murder, but Tom doesn't yet know about the murder that happened before he even bought the house. The characters lift off the pages as real people with all their strengths and failures and the reader is drawn into their humanity. As the story moves to its chaotic climax we are engaged in their fears and desperation and their hope that a half baked plan will succeed.

There are two twists at the end that round out the story of two of the main characters. They give comfort to the reader while at the same time leaving questions about the nature of time travel itself and what can really be achieved for the future by going back into the past.

Imagine you wrote a story with a twist at the end, but moved that twist to the very early part, and then added in another twist a little further on, and then another and another and another. That is this book.

At its heart it's the story of identical twin brothers who, after winning a bronze medal for rowing in the 1936 Munich Olympics, find their strongly held political differences over the coming war force them apart. One becomes a RAF pilot and the other a conscientious objector. But this is not an 'at the heart' kind of novel. It is filled with distractions, body doubles, alternate histories, hallucinations, personal insecurities, power struggles, romance and jealousies, and probably other conflicts that I have missed.

The twins are both J.L. Sawyer, Joe and Jack. Rudolph Hess presents their medals and jokes about twins playing tricks on people, but it's Hess (and Churchill) who later don't effectively separate them. Then we add in that Churchill recruits Jack as Aide de Camp on his trips through bombed out London to encourage the locals and Jack soon realises he's working for a body double. Ironically, the real Churchill sends Jack to interrogate a high ranking German prisoner, especially to determine if the man is who he said he is. The prisoner is Hess who had flown to Britain trying to broker a peace accord. Jack determines that it's not the real Hess, but another body double.

Priest uses memoirs, press reports, private papers, and release war documents to build up the story. Jack and Joe each have long sections telling of their experiences, one flying bombing missions into Germans and the other driving an ambulance after bombing raids on London. The reader notices that certain dates don't match, such as the war ending in 1941, but later the war ended in 1945. We realise that there are two histories running parallel through the novel and Priest has woven them into the story so well that we hardly notice the transition. So we start to take much more notice of the documents he's quoting, trying to see where the following narrative falls.

Both brothers are injured. Jack is shot down returning from a raid and rescued after hours in a life raft. But his navigator later says that he was the only survivor of the crash. Joe's ambulance is hit by a bomb and in one portion of the story he's killed but in another place he's knocked out and later found in a hostel in London with severe concussion which results in severe and repeated hallucinations. The movement between these different histories is sometimes subtle and sometimes jarring, but they weave in and out of the novel like strands of a rope.

It is as if Priest wanted to tell a story that was at once clear and at the same time confusing. He succeeded. The book is fascinating and engaging and it's no wonder that it was awarded literary prizes on publication.

The Condor has not returned from a distant planet and so her sistership, The Invincible, is sent out to find answers. They land on the planet and immediately it becomes apparent that there is disharmony between the crew. The commander is distant, his second in command is wary, various crew communities such as the scientists have differing views from the technicians.

The covers of many of the various editions of the book show a space helmet with a skull inside, so it's no surprise that they find the Condor crew dead. It's the why and the how that form the rest of the novel. The book is reminiscent of Lem's Solaris in that the humans are on a strange planet thinking they can overcome anything that comes against them. But, once again, they can only guess at the reality of the alien intelligence that they find. Just as in Solaris we have a divided crew, an enemy that can take over the minds of the humans, and a crew that does not have any women but differs from Solaris in that the planet does not conjure any into existence.

Portions of the later story are taken up with longish discussions between crew members of what is really happening on the planet and Lem goes deeply into a similar philosophical position as in Solaris that just because a planet is there does not mean that humans have the right or the ability to take it. Calling the ship Invincible is part of his ironic look at such human endeavour. And the final image is one of failure and defeat.

This is a novel of quiet sanity compared to much of PKD's work. Ragle Gumm spends his day working on a daily puzzle in the local newspaper called, Guess Where the Little Green Man Will Appear Next. He lives with his sister and her husband and son. Next door lives the nuisance couple who are always visiting at inopportune times. But there are times when Ragle 'sees through to the other side of the world' and it's not like his normal reality. He worries that those moments are signs of mental illness.

The story is rather benign until the 25% mark, at which point a conversation happens between two characters who should not know each other. Their conversation points to not only a link between them but a common purpose, and that purpose concerns Ragle Gumm. From there the story darkens and the reader is slowly fed grains of the truth behind these various characters.

'Ragle' is the reverse of Elgar, the composer of the work The Enigma Variations, a musical work depicting several of his friends, but he never told anyone which variation portrayed which friend. And this is the theme that Dick follows through the novel. We slowly realise that the characters are not who they say they are, and not who Ragle believes they are. Just as The Truman Show portrayed a town set up solely to be the backdrop to one man's story, so Ragle and his daily competition is the centre of a military project that is keeping the world safe.

PKD's oft repeated exploration of human consciousness often takes us into the weird and crazy. Here the theme is explored but with a quiet subtlety as Ragle Gumm awakens to his own reality. And once awake he faces an old decision.

This novella takes us into a surealist noir-like detective story where unexplained strangeness is the order of the day.

A famous architect builds a house that runs on an artificial intelligence. In this way the house continues as the repository of all his major work after his death. Think of HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey, but less murdery. The house remains locked except for one person the AI will allow in as an archivist, but only for seven days each year.

One day the house calls the local police station to say there is a dead body inside. How did that guy get inside? Who killed him and how? How will the police investigate when they can't get inside to examine the scene?

The story is part locked room mystery, part gothic horror, part police procedural, part sardonic poke at one of the detectives who keeps wondering if he's in some noir detective story at last.

Overall it's a rather brittle story, as if reality is being bent almost to snapping point. Martine doesn't give anything away and the reader is left to work out their own take-away from it all. Nothing is really explained, the tension builds and falls away in unexpected moments, and the ending doesn't resolve the questions that the book presents.

This is one of PKD's most coherent novels. Two characters vie for the role as main protagonist. There is Jack, an electrical repair man and there is Manfred, a boy locked up in an institution for being 'anomolous'. For that we can read non neurotypical. Dick refers to autism on some occasions but the boy is not seen as that by those around him. And for a book written in the early 60s we should not expect a modern understanding.

Jack is called to a repair and gets involved with a powerful local union boss, Arnie, who is impressed with his work. Running parallel is the discovery that Jack's neighbours have a son, the boy in the institution whose father has just died. Jack's family gets involved with Manfred and through that Arnie makes a claim on the boy as he believes people with such brain function can see the future. Arnie recruits Jack to build a facility/machine that will allow them to communicate with Manfred so Arnie can interrogate the future.

Through a web of family relationships and power games, Dick explores the themes of isolation, shared hardship, mental illness and psychosis, and the human need to have mastery over our environment and community.

As the story develops we find that Manfred can communicate almost telepathically with the indigenous martian people. In a last ditch attempt to gain control over a situation that has escaped him, Arnie and Manfred set off on a pilgrimage inspired by the indigenous culture. Once again, Arnie can't quite keep control of things as we approach the climax of the story.

And then at the closing pages PKD hits us with a brick between the eyes. "I bet you didn't see that coming," he says as the book come to a close.

An easy reading romp of a novel that swaps between being a tribute to Raymond Chandler's noir detectives and mildly dystopian science fiction. It was a single sitting rainy Saturday read for me that was undemanding as long as I kept track of the weird stuff.

Metcalf is a gritty and cynical private 'inquisitor', the change in his job title represents the dystopic culture of the time. He's employed by a client, the client turns up dead and another man asks him to investigate it as he's in the firing line to be charged with the murder. The 'Inquisitor Office' gets in the way of his investigation and the novel proceeds as a game of cat and mouse as the facts of the case slowly get revealed. Along the way his 'karma' card keeps being docked by the Office to scare him off. Zero karma points could see him taken out of the society.

There are the normal noir detective tropes of cynical banter, women to be ogled, people being followed into dark places, bars with cigarette butts in pools of beer on the floor, all the expected stuff. There are also 'evolved' animals, modified animals that mimic humans, walking upright, wearing clothes, talking, carrying guns. And everybody is snorting drugs variously named as Forgettol, Avoidol, Acceptol, to smooth out their experience of living.

The book won the Locus Award for best first novel in 1995 so it came with a pedigree. However, the thirty years since has pushed the misogyny into the 'no go' zone. And even for a 1995 novel to hark back fifty years was pushing it. The weirdness of the characters held my attention and I was less interested in the 'who dunit' aspect as I was in the play between the human and animal power tripping. OK, as an Australian I wanted to know more about that kangaroo on the cover.

As things came to a head between Metcalf and the Office the story took an unexpected u-turn and the whole endeavour seemed lost. The final chapters take us into a new world and Metcalf has to adapt with instant reflexes to bring the investigation to a close. This final part of the story elevated it up a notch and gave a sense of satisfaction to my day of reading.

PS. The novel took inspiration from a quote by a Chandler character, "... the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."

Deadbeat Chuck is being divorced by his more successful marriage counselor wife. He's a programmer for simulacrum robots for the CIA but it seems he's better at writing lifelike code for robots than he is at living his own life. Chuck sees two possibilities, suicide or murder his ex wife.

His wife decides to go off to one of the moons in the Alphane star system to work with the communities that have formed since the psychiatric hospital closed down. The patients have gathered into villages according to their shared psychoses and suddenly Earth has decided they need 'help' - ie. We'd like to take their moon.

Chuck wangles his way into taking charge of the CIA robot that will accompany his wife on the mission, planning for the robot to kill her. Trouble is, a new second job he's been offered writing comedy scripts for a TV personality wants him to write a script where a man programs a robot to murder his wife. This is beginning to sound very suspicious to Chuck.

This novel is a comedic look at the human personality when it splits into its many components. The various moon dwellers, Chuck's current mental state, his wife's incipient violence, a couple of other female characters, the CIA management, there's an intelligent telepathic slime mold alien life form, are all metaphors for the aspects of the inner life that PKD has been setting out in his books from the beginning. As a self-referential look at the ridiculousness of human life, this is PKD saying, "If your life is anything like mine, welcome to the crazy club."

A tale of increasing unpleasantness. I picked this up as I loved Noon's Vurt. Had I read this first I would probably have not read Vurt at all.

This starts out as a bit of a mystery story with a weird underlying theme of people being either a writer of their own life or a character in somebody else's writing. It seems to be developing into a metaphor for the Thought Police of 1984. However, half way through it turns towards being body horror and after that a strange and ancient magic works its way into the foundation of whatever has been happening. It ends with a bunch of people out in a field with all the magic stuff rising off them as if they are in medieval England on 'witching day' or something.

The prose is thick with over-described thought processes that left me wondering when I was going to feel some emotional attachment to any of the characters. In the 'show, don't tell' arena, this had many losing moments. It was as if Noon was forcing his narrative to drag me along, knowing it wasn't succeeding very often.

The detective, Nyquist, is a pretty normal noir investigator. He's dogged in his determination to follow his nose no matter the cost, and his nose never seems to get it wrong. There's a woman, there's the police, although in this setting they are The Narrative Police making sure people are writing their story properly (i.e. spying on everyone), and there are lots of dark corridors in tall buildings. If Nyquist's gonzo side had been let loose we might have had a taste of Dark City or Gilliam's Brazil.

The theme of 'everything depends on the words' that underlies the story tries to take it into an hallucinogenic direction that it just doesn't want to go.

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.

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.

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.

In the early pages of this book I thought I was in some Kafka world. By the time I got to later parts I didn't know what to make of it. And as it ended I was getting a bit of a feel for what is really going on. I guess being weird for the sake of being weird sometimes turns out OK.

Ultimately this is a book of warfare, but we never really find out who the enemy is. What we do find out is that the enemy has the power to erase any memories the people have of their engagement with them, or it, or anything to do with the war. In this respect the enemy is an anti-meme. A meme is a thing that we remember but has a life of its own. And antimeme exists if we observe it but no sooner do we turn our back and it is gone from memory and therefore gone from existence.

The Foundation is the only surviving agency fighting the war, and its members are disappearing. The stronger antimemes have the power to overrun a person's mind to the point of death. Foundation agents take certain drugs that allow them to remember antimeme contact and therefore plot against them. We learn that there has been at least one antimeme war that obliterated the human population some time in the distant past.

Marion Wheeler is the main agent and head of The Foundation. Her husband, Adam, is not an agent but he seems to be immune from the 'forget impact' and the antimemes. Marion is the main player in the book, but Adam emerges as humanity's real hope towards the end.

The world has gone through a nuclear war and lies in ruins. 600 years later some communities of people are forming, and one of them is a monastic order dedicated to Saint Leibowitz. He was martyred for his faith in the aftermath of the war and we are introduced to a novice of the order, Brother Francis. Francis stumbles into a buried fallout shelter and finds more of the writings of Leibowitz, but revealing them to his Abbot causes a crisis. Are they authentic? What do they mean? And what do they reveal about Leibowitz?

As the novel progresses we find that the history in the minds of the monks is not as they believe. They live in naivete about the past and its consequences. Their shared holiness, however, maintains them in faith and conviction.

The undercurrents of the novel reveal that Leibowitz was an engineer and his 'writings' are engineering and electronic diagrams. He was killed in a time called The Simplification where all educated people were seen as the cause of the war and were murdered by the survivors as they burned any surviving books and libraries. The monks were secretly finding and storing books and teaching themselves to read.

Part 1 of the book is the story of Francis. He is the sweetest and most wholesome person imaginable and he maintains his faith in his precious saint and lives in obedience to his Abbot through the political wranglings of his superiors caused by what Francis has found. The gentle humour that underlies much of the book is shown when Francis finds the fallout shelter. He knows that 'fallout' killed most of the world's inhabitants but he doesn't know what it is. He sees the sign 'Fallout Shelter' on the door and thinks 'That must be where a fallout is hiding. No way am I opening that door. It might still be alive and attack me.'

Part 2 of the book takes us another 600 years into the future. The monastery has expanded in numbers and the buildings have been fortified. Other communities have risen, one of them is the 'city' where ignorant and uneducated people have control over the political life, the other is a band of savages living in the forest. They waylay travelers and are known for cannibalism. The monks continue to struggle with interpreting the works of Leibowitz, but secular intellectuals from the city are now interested as they think there might be leads towards learning the technology of the past. The Abbott of this era is occupied in preserving the monastery and their saint in the face of the warfare that is looming after the city reinvents gun powder and muskets and can now move against the savages.

Part 3 takes us a further 600 years. Space travel has been achieved, technology is everywhere and the Abbott has a self driving car and his order has a starship ready to take missionaries to the colony worlds of Alpha Centauri. But technology also means the increase of nuclear weapons and an old threat reemerges. Much of this part of the book is taken up with discussions of morality and responsibility as the Abbot and his order struggle to maintain the beliefs that have informed their community life for centuries against the pragmatism of the city and a looming nuclear faceoff.

It was only after reading the book that I found that the author had been a rear gunner of a bomber in WW2 and on one mission they'd bombed a monastery in Italy. It had a profound effect on him and he converted to Catholicism after the war and struggled with PTSD and depression. 1959, the publication date, was also a time of great fear in America (I'm not American) and children used to do attack drills and were taught to hide under their desks etc. For me, sixty five years later and on the other side of the world, the story still hits hard for its literary value and without the undercurrent of fear that fueled American life when it was written.

Abelard Lindsay is a shaper and his cousin Constantine is a mechanist. The shapers see the future of humanity in genetic enhancement. The mechanists see it as physical futurism with enhanced body parts. They can't both be right. And they choose not to be. This book is the story of Lindsay, a shaper diplomat, as he travels the interplanetary spread of humanity to promote the shaper ideology. And on his heels is Constantine. Each of they appear and disappear as they take different identities, trying to influence other civilisations and to defeat each other. On his travels Lindsay takes on not only different names but different body structure and abilities. At the end it seems as if the future of humanity is to return to the sea as sub-oceanic beings on the moons of Jupiter. Or something. It gets confusing at the end.

The characters start out being engaging as the conflict between them is slowly revealed. However, by the half way point it's become something of a travelogue with different planets or asteroids requiring different body forms for Lindsay. He gets into danger on one asteroid and escapes to another, rinse and repeat.

At about the 75% point the narrative descends into long conversations where the sociopolitical advantages and disadvantages of various views of post-humanism are discussed. It's like sitting in a bar with the people at the next table talking about the obscurities of their work and all the while the reader wishes he'd accepted the invitation to play darts instead.

Overall the book is reminiscent of Accelerando where the increasingly complicated language of hard SF is played out like a game of UNO.