Kim Miller

I never saw myself falling in love with a robot but Klara won me over. Despite some awkward passages Ishiguro has written an engaging story of an artificial friend. Clara is a robot designed to be the friend of a young child. She is chosen by Rosie and the two form a real bond.

Klara sees Rosie through times of illness, of budding romance, and of the move to adulthood. Through it all Klara's innocence and insight make a beguiling coupling as her inner AI grows and develops. Ishiguro turns the "AI will destroy humanity" them on its head as Klara become the pivot point for Rosie and her family.

The ending of the story is something that we never see coming and it left me with a sense of pain and grief, but Klara remains as she always was, hopeful and satisfied that she was the best friend to Rosie that she could be.

Vurt (1993) is Noon's first novel and he started out with a bang. It got the Arthur C. Clarke prize in 1994. The book is a high speed race through the drug fueled underworld of Manchester by a street gang named the Stash Riders. Reading the novel feels like being thrown into a group hallucination where the boundaries of what is real and what is imagined are obliterated.

Scribble is the one telling the story, Beetle is their leader and driver, Brid is Beetle's girlfriend, Mandy is the new member, Twinkle is a local kid who talks herself into the gang, the Thing is a weird living blob who came out of an hallucination, and Desdemona is Scribble's lover (also sister) who has disappeared in that same hallucination in some sort of exchange.

The story takes it's lead from the myth of Orpheus in the underworld as he seeks to rescue his lost wife. Along the way there are allusions to Lewis Caroll, Shakespeare, punk culture, Gibson style cyberpunk, Clockwork Orange vibes, and a whole lot of crazy.

The drug use is based on feathers that users suck on where different colours designate different types of hallucinatory effects. Some are street legal, some are not. Some are cosy comfort and some are pornographic. Some are safe, some can be deadly. Scribble's goal of finding Desdemona means he's looking for the most dangerous, the Curious Yellow. Yeah, movie reference there.

I was impressed with the relentless nature of the story. Scribble's mind is like a V8 engine running in a Mini Minor and is at full throttle all the way. Noon keeps up the pace as Scribble moves in and out of hallucinatory states so that we sometimes have trouble telling the difference. Everything is a race for Scribble, and the book ends by crashing into the final scenes and leaving us a bit stunned.

There are a couple of elements that disturbed me on reading, they are the brother/sister incest and the bestiality with dogs and 'robodogs' - (both people and dogs are sometimes enhanced with mechanistic elements). It took me a while to see these as a part of Noon's references to Greek mythology, where the Gods and heroes are often in incestual relationships and taking the form of various animals to seduce desirable humans. We read the myths without moralising too much, and in Vurt, Noon is confronting us with the same dynamic in a futuristic world.

I had trouble giving stars to this novel. Do I give it more for its sheer audacity and fireworks brilliance? Do I give it less because the characters are often shallow and unlikable and with few redeeming qualities? Do I give it less because of the incest/bestiality? Do I give it more for the talent that is obvious in the consistency of the story? I decided to mark it upwards, 4.5 stars.

So there's this guy Vergil. He's nerdy, overweight and unhealthy, and he hacked his university's data system to add in credentials he never earned so he could get a job in a bio lab doing research work. Do we like him? Probably not but Greg Bear writes him in such a way that we start out on his side.

The bio lab finds that he's been doing private stuff after hours. He's experimenting with encoding bio information and DNA onto microchips, wanting to create intelligent nanobots he can inject into people to cure diseases etc. It's not the normal approach to the mad scientist with dangerous intentions that we see, but Bear sneaks him in under our radar.

His boss decides he's got to go - today. But Vergil needs more time in the lab to complete his current experiments because he's getting somewhere. He needs to get his samples past the security guys and out of the lab. He decides to inject them into himself, then find another job in another lab where he can extract them and continue his work.

Does his plan work? Partly. The cells he's manufactured start multiplying in his bloodstream and they kick his system into a more healthy state. His physical condition improves. His eyesight improves. He becomes a fantastic lover. Everything is looking great for him. But he can't get another lab job and he can't control the increase of the 'wonder cells' in his body.

As the novel progresses the cells become a contagion and spread to other people. They cause changes that are far beyond what Vergil imagined. And like everything that a mad scientist in a SF book causes, things accelerate to the unbearable and point to the destruction of humankind.

A dystopian story of Melbourne between about 2040 and 2060. Rising sea levels brought on by climate change have flooded the lower parts of the city and are creeping higher. People are separated into two social strata, the Sweet are the higher ground dwellers with employment, power, and influence, and the Swill are those living amid the flood waters. Tall towers have been built for them, and meagre food and services are provided by the government increasingly stretched by the demand.

The Conway family start out as Sweet but with the death of the father are cast down into the Fringe, not quite Swill but with no employment and rejected by their old world. They meet Jimmy Kovacs, the nearby tower boss and protection racketeer. He takes a shine to the widow and her two young sons. The bulk of the novel is the story of these four.

One son is smart and gets elevated for training by the government. The other is a numbers savant and is sought out by black marketeers. Jimmy holds together a whole tower of Swill by strength of personality and mob boss mentality, and extends his influence into the lives of the two growing boys to keep them safe. A crisis occurs soon after the half way point that threatens the whole city and because of their involvement looks as if it will drag them all down with it.

Each chapter of the novel is written first person from the POV of one or other of the characters. This means taking note of the chapter title as it can be confusing. The author gives us deep insight into the thinking of each one as sometimes the same event is covered by two or three characters and we see the variance of understanding of each person. Turner shows that he has great skill in writing interpersonal relationships as this technique could easily become a mess of head-hopping. He knows how and when to pit people against each other, and he knows how to bring them together.

There was an early trope that annoyed me where somebody says, "I've written a novel ..." and it looked as if the book was to be a 'novel within a novel' thing. Luckily Turner's skill as an author and commenter on human life rose above it. In the early pages I had a three star rating in mind for that initial clumsiness but that rose to 4.5 by the end.

Astronauts on the moon discover the body of a dead astronaut, but his space suit is different and none of their people are missing. Investigation shows the frozen and mummified corpse to be 50,000 years old. What follows is a cold case investigation as scientists from many fields try to unravel the story of the dead man, who they name Charlie.

Character development and plot are secondary to the investigatory process here, and much of the book is taken up with discussions and conjecture as people suggest various theories and possibilities. Over time more is revealed as they learn to understand printed manuals from Charlie's backpack. They identify a calendar, mathematical formulae, diary notes. But who he is and how he came to be on the moon remains a mystery.

Other explorations change their understanding of the moon's surface structure, and another discovery on one of the moons of Jupiter opens up a whole new area of investigation.

It becomes a bit like an Agatha Christie revelation towards the end as the lead scientist puts together all the clues. The only possibility that holds everything together blows his mind as the history of the solar system and the whole of human evolution is called into question.

Back in 1951 a strange building appears in a city street. It's a weapons shop. Two men approach, for one the door won't open, for the other it will. He enters and soon after the shop and the man disappears.

This is a story of time swinging between events that are forced increasingly apart. The reason for the swing has something to do with the disappeared man. But the narrative centers on a far future empire rife with corruption, and in which the weapon shops are the focus of resistance.

We follow the life of a young man who leaves home and hopes to become significant in the government. He doesn't realise how deep the corruption runs but as he becomes more aware he uses it to his advantage. And still the weird time swings keep happening.

van Vogt works through the question, "What would happen if a time traveler met himself in the past?" It's an interesting solution he finds, and one in which the young man gains extraordinary power and influence. In one conversation we get the sentence, "He was here with his twin brother."

The political forces battle it out until both sides are forced to admit the damage being done to the disappeared man and that the time swings need to be stopped. The book ends by giving us a look into his mind, and the final sentence, in just a few words, breaks my mind as van Vogt drops his most powerful bomb into the story.

On the planet of Indigo people are genetically designed and born through IVF. But sometimes a woman conceives naturally, and the baby can be far from the perfection expected. Ugly, that's her nickname, real name Magdala, is such a person. Misshapen and unattractive she lives a secluded life, ignored by coworkers and desperately lonely. But one day a strange man appears in her life.

Claudio effectively kidnaps her and promises to make her beautiful. He puts her through a process of consciousness swapping whereby her whole sense of self is transferred to a perfectly formed android. Her original body is kept in a stasis chamber and has to be maintained. Magdala is now beautiful but totally in the power of Claudio. And he turns out to be a psychopath.

Tanith Lee writes him with surgical precision as he keeps Magdala under micromanaged abusive control. Magdala soon realises that he is following some plan of his own, a plan of hatred and revenge upon the woman her new body is designed to mimic.

The plot expands to include that woman, named Christophine, sometimes Christa, and we come to an awkward linking of names echoing Christ and Mary Magdalene, and of the unlovely being granted a new life. It might be a metaphor Lee is working towards but the novel is better served by being about the abusive relationship under Claudio than some sort of reach towards redemption.

The central part of the book brings us to the scientific conflict between those seeking to make consciousness transfer a reality and the three central characters reach an inevitable crisis.

But then Lee shifts into reverse gear and resets the whole thing. The final ten pages is either a monumental plot twist (if so if fails in my mind) or a low effort in ending the story because it was all headed to catastrophe. I was looking forward to catastrophe.

The character Claudio is so finely written that I was captivated by Lee's skill. His treatment of Magda is constantly and relentlessly undermining, such that although he's elevated her physical beauty he's also intent on keeping her locked into her original body image. The weird ending was almost like an apology for writing Claudio in such surgical detail.

On a distant planet the men sit making intricate carpets from the hair of their wives and daughters. Each carpet takes a lifetime to make and each man makes only one. His son follows in the same traditional art, designing and making his single carpet. The empire's space ships pick up the carpets and they are sent to decorate the palace of the Emperor.

Rumours start to circulate that the Emperor is dead and the empire is no more. But still the carpet makers continue their work. When a space ship lands on the planet the ship's crew knows nothing of the carpet makers or the carpets. People who have been to the palace say they have never seen such a carpet there.

Eschbach has given us a series of what seems like interlinked short stories, each one centering on a single character, but each one also adding to the narrative. He steadily builds his story through a sense of mystery towards the final revelation. There are so many possibilities for metaphor here, of weaving a story, of pulling together the loose threads, of only seeing a hint of the story (carpet) because we are looking at the back of it, and I will not fall into the metaphor trap.

The prose is easy to read and without the clumsiness that can sometimes happen with a translated work. Eschbach's imagination carries us through the occasional weirdness of the story, and through our times of wondering what happened to a character or two who seems to have disappeared from the story. His final revelation is one of total insanity and I was left wondering how this situation could even have been reasonable or possible. However, Eschbach made it sound very believable.

Andrew Harlan is a 'Eternal', effectively a time traveling policeman. When history takes a bad turn the Eternals work out when the best intervention would be to prevent it. Harlan was one of those who go back in time and effect a minor change to avert disaster.

He's a totally unlikable character, but the book is filled with Asimov's cardboard cutout characters who are all totally without charisma. The plot and plot development are the thing here. Couple that with some cool tech, considering the book was written in the 1950s, and an increasing element of philosophizing about time travel, and it gets its stars.

The alternate time zone of the Eternals is filled with men only. Harlan meets a woman, the only one in the whole book, they make love, he is infatuated, he moves to get her out of her time zone and into his world. Things don't go as planned. The middle of the book is taken up with 'everything that can go wrong does go wrong' and their whole existence is threatened. With his supervisor they cobble together a plan to save everything. There is a longish episodic crisis that issues in a final showdown as Harlan is forced into a drastic decision

The book has all the 1950s expectations that men run the world, women get in the way if they venture into the man's world, and their only purpose is for men to get laid. Male interactions are purely functional and the characters here spend more time being suspicious of each other than working together. The only person with character is the sole female, Noÿs.

David Queston is an anthropologist who has spent some years studying tribal communities in South America. One of those communities has gone through some catastrophe that he is trying to identify. When he has completed his studies he returns to England to write up his thoughts.

He finds England changed. A mad psychopath has taken control and is isolating the country from the world and sending everybody back to where they came from. This means local people are sent back to their family roots. i.e. families named Stewart are sent back to Scotland regardless of them never having lived there.

The Minister of Planning and then Prime Minister is named Mandrake. Two obvious parallels come to mind. First, the author would have known of the syndicated cartoon, Mandrake the Magician. He could 'gesture hypnotically' and people would be open to suggestion. Second, the mythological plant, the mandrake, screams when it is uprooted. Both these metaphors run through the book. Everybody seems under the thrall of Mandrake.

Queston spends two years in a quiet country cottage writing up his notes, unaware that the social structures around him are failing so badly. Then men from the Ministry of Planning call on him. They want his notes and they want his mind. His research is too close to revealing what is happening in England. He goes on the run.

As England dissolves into a dystopian hellscape it seems that there is a malevolent intelligence driving everything. From isolationist paranoia to earthquakes and wild snowstorms, everything is bent on the destruction of the country and dead bodies line the streets. Queston and some companions he finds along the way are torn between escaping it and facing it to destroy it.

The darkness increases as Cooper sets the scene of humans against the unknown. Is it supernatural evil? Is it aliens? Is it some new weapon system? The tension builds and the end of the book approaches. The reader asks, "Are all these threads going to get tied up by the end?"

No spoilers, folks.

Rudy Waltz grows up in Vonnegut's Midland City in Ohio. His 'memoir' tells of his father's failed life as an artist, during which he become friends with another failed artist, Hitler. His parents are wealthy and Rudy grows up a rich kid until he shoots a gun out of the top of his house and the bullet hits somebody. From there everything becomes a train wreck for him and his family.

Rudy sleepwalks through life until ending up as co-owner of a hotel in Haiti, from which he tells the story.

The book is a rich stew of Vonnegut's acidic satire and written in a way that immediately fills out the characters and draws in the reader. From his father's delusions and non-ironic contact with Hitler, the dissociated family, police brutality, government incompetence, until the final escape as refugees into the country of refugees.

I was left feeling I'd been in a Wes Anderson movie with a darker than normal colour pallette. It was a very enjoyable fantasy world.

Alvin lives in the city of Diaspar. He's a young man who has a problem. He can't remember any of his past lives as expected, and as is the experience of everyone around him. The city births its citizens according to the inner thoughts of a central computer. And at the end of their lives it takes them back into itself, to be birthed again in some distant future.

But Alvin is a disruptor. He is curious. He wants to know what is outside the city. He goes exploring. All of these are not the life of his companions.

With the help of the mysterious city jester, another disruptor, he finds his way into the depths of the city and out to the wider world. And in that moment he seals the fate of the city to a future they have feared for a billion years.

The book is let down by long passages of descriptions of what Alvin sees on his travels, material that does not move the story along. The characters are also a bit thin until Alvin meets Hilvar who becomes his traveling companion and his first ever real friend. Hilvar brings a certain kind of humanity to Alvin and to the story.

Alvin and Hilvar travel to distant stars to try to understand the origins of Earth's current situation, a place trying to recover from inter-planetary warfare. They return to find the city in crisis, and Alvin at last learns the reason for his existence. The book closes on a world that knows it has change, and it is only in the closing pages that Alvin starts to draw some emotion from the reader as he realises who he is, what he has done, and what will be his future.

Thousands of years ago a monastery was established on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. It was intended as the elevation of humankind into the heavens, and although fraught with internal factions, it lasted for centuries. And in the not so distant future a space engineer wanted to use the mountain to construct a space elevator that would link to a geostationary satellite 24,000 miles above the Earth. Humans have established colonies on the Moon and Mars and the elevator will reduce rocket transport.

Clarke blends the story of the monastery into the similarly themed story of the space elevator. The engineer has achieved 'top monk' status by building a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar and is almost a prophet of engineering. But other political forces are against him. Into the political mix comes an ambassador from Mars who wants the project moved to his planet. There's nothing like a bit of FOMO to stir things along. And there's also an alien 'thing' like a mini Rendezvous with Rama that wanders past.

Clarke takes us through some of the hard science stuff of building the elevator and the story jumps along over much of the construction. The monastery has dissolved too easily in a paragraph or two to clear the way. Because we all know Clarke's repetition of 'religion will disappear' message.

It all goes along pretty well until there's a life and death crisis. At last there's something happening that gets my heart beating faster. Clarke is usually not so intent on making his characters really human but here we see him digging deeper.

The wrap up takes us into the far future. The elevator has been successfully completed. It's so successful that there are several around the planet and, guess what, they're linked together in a ring around the Earth. And the alien 'thing' returns for Clarke to tell us again the children are the future.

It's a great story and won awards but loses a star from me for some of the tropes that flow too easily onto the page.

A detective is called to a New York building where a woman is sitting on a parapet hundreds of feet above the street. He tries to talk her back. She says she can't live with the memories of a second life that flood her mind. She called it FMS, False Memory Syndrome.

The woman is not alone as an increasing number of people suffer from the same thing. The detective does some off-book digging and finds evidence for the other life the woman experiences. But then he finds himself immersed in the same experience.

Recursion is a novel of repeats. Repeated lives, repeated experiences, repeated trauma. Crouch has framed this SciFi theme in a new and well thought out narrative. The science is well done but the standout for me was the character development.

The detective moves from a man running from overbearing grief to somebody intent on making sure that what he experiences stops with him. The scientist is driven by her mother's dementia to find a way of stopping her decline but finds herself in a high stakes battle of wits. Another character thinks he's saving the world while his ego driven desires are endangering everything.

I found myself engaging with the characters at a very personal level. They were not merely shapes on the page but people with widely shared human frailty and struggles. And the wrapping of it all in an exploration of time and memory was skillfully handled.

Recursion has earned a place with such works as the movie Primer and the novels, The Lathe of Heaven and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

PKD novels need a rating scale from ho-hum through weird to trippy, with a few more levels thrown in somewhere. If Ubik and Palmer Eldritch are trippy, Dr. Bloodmoney falls into weird.

A sudden nuclear war leaves the world mostly destroyed, with small communities forming around centres of survival. We find ourselves amid a disparate bunch of people struggling to make sense of things. The Dr.Bloodmoney character is a minor player for most of the narrative. In focus are a young man born with no limbs because of thalidomide but with telekinetic ability, and a young girl whose imaginary brother turns out to be a parasitic twin in her belly. These three form a centre of warring power against each other.

Above them all is an astronaut, stranded in orbit from which he transmits book readings and DJ music to the world. The only surviving radio broadcast on Earth.

The story is one of dark humor, the writing off-handed, and the characters totally unbelievable. But PKD uses his inner weirdness to pull it together into a tale of guilt, power, and a desire for peace and calm. He starts with a bland city street encounter but ends with a growing sense of unease as a crisis builds. And suddenly it's over. Not with a bang but a whimper. OK, that's probably the way nuclear war always ends.

The direct follow-on from Ilium. Ilium finished at convenient point rather than a satisfactory point. Neither book really stands on its own. And both are long, with a combined page count of about 1,500 pages.

Olympos exposes more of the underlying thought of the Ilium universe. The three threads of the story start to bounce off each other. The literary scholar monitoring the Trojan war for the gods of Olympus inserts himself into the events, thus causing Homer's history to come unstuck. The far future humans are under attack from the biomachines that have been their servants for centuries. And this ancient Greek guy named Odysseus has turned up to teach them hand to hand battle skills. The Shakespeare and Proust quoting robots have been co-opted by an advanced alien race to find out why there is such a dangerous level of quantum emissions from a mountain on Mars.

The literary sparing between the robots continues to form the scaffolding of much of the story. And their interactions slowly suggest what is behind the time/location shifts of the overall work. Simmons suggests that when a genius, like Shakepeare or Homer, writes a genius work, like The Tempest or The Iliad, then those worlds are brought into being as alternate universes. And Simmons' story jumps between them without barriers.

Olympos does the time/place jumps effortlessly, so effortlessly that the reader follows on accepting what is happening without necessarily seeing this underlying schema.

The book has countless side plots that can get a bit heavy-handed but as the story speeds up in the final 25% of the book these tangents are shown to have some bearing on the final outcome. Simmons manages to keep a lot of balls in the air in this process. There is also a lot of little comments in the book that might be seen as easter eggs that Simmons has left lying around. While there is no deliberate humor in the overall work, these little pop-ups give a bit of light relief if we notice them.

And while I said there is no deliberate humor, as the book progresses there is a growing sense in which Simmons is saying, "How can I totally mess up the historical narrative of Homer and keep people engaged?" Imagine that Banksy has just painted over some famous work and people say, 'Yep, that works for me'.

This is book #1 of a pair, and it ends pointing the reader to the next book.

Three stories more or less intertwine. A literary scholar is watching over the Trojan war and reporting back to the gods on Olympus. He's long dead but has been revived/remade by the gods. His job is to monitor how the progress of the war matches the stories of Homer, his academic speciality.

Second thread is a Shakespeare quoting robot from one of Jupiter's moons who has a submarine and is sent on a strange journey. A second robot is a fan of Proust and the two form a sparring friendship. Third thread is a group of humans living under an existential threat in a far future Earth. Their life seems to be perfection and Elysium but it's about to fall apart.

Simmons has packed the story with literary references from Greek historians, Shakespeare, Proust, Nabokov, and some modern poets. It gets a bit overloaded at times where long literary conversations are used to steer the plot. However, his prose is good and the characters are well fleshed out for the most part, once we figure out who is human and who is something else. Also, Simmons should not try to write sex scenes.

There are time shifts that take some thought to work out as we move from ancient Troy to far future humans, to several aliens with varying levels of AI enhancement, to the gods on Olympus that mysteriously seem to have a lot of quantum science on their side.

The story moves along pretty well but it takes a long time before the three threads start to move toward each other. And the book ends with only the beginnings of some contact between the threads.

Simon Stahlenhad is a special type of magic. His art has astounded people for decades. In this graphic novella we have Michelle, a young woman, perhaps even still a teenager. She is traveling through a desolate landscape with a robot she calls Skip. There are illustrations of Stahlenhag's machines on at least half of the pages. Full page illustrations and then perhaps a half page of text.

The war between humans and robots is over. There is almost nothing left but giant mechanical beasts littering the countryside. People are wandering, dazed, and catatonically under the influence of an invasive neural AI that infects their brains through a connected headset.

Michelle is driving west for an unstated reason. Her dialogue is flat matter-of-fact and toneless and the story is told completely without emotion. She has an address in a community out on the end of a peninsula. The bulk of the book is the tale of the journey.

Once there we see what she has been aiming for. No spoilers here but suddenly Michelle's narrative is alive with emotion. She knows that now she has to make a terrible decision that might have disastrous consequences.

The book only takes an hour or so to read but you'll need to add time just to sit and absorb the many illustrations of Stahlenhag's world. It's a tale of defeat and desperation that issues in a sudden burst of love and hope at the end. Love and hope that is hemmed in with the always present possibility of destruction.

Ambassador Mahit continues to surround herself with trouble in this follow up to A Memory Called Empire.

The struggles for supremacy at the capital have continued as the empire pursues an interplanetary war out on the edges of it's territory. A new emperor has been named and a guardian has been put on the throne until the emperor is of age. The Ministry of War is struggling against the Ministry of Information, and other sections of government are claiming their sphere of influence with those at the top.

The first book revealed that Mahit's mining has technology whereby a person's memories are stored on a brain stem implant chip, called an imago. The person's successor is then given those memories. This was developed so that pilots could be enhanced by the skills of their predecessors and lessen training time. Once this is discovered, there are those in the empire who want the technology, believing it to be some sort of eternal life existence.

Mahit has returned to her mining station and is running from discovery. When she was given her predecessor's memory, the official in charge of that department had deliberately sabotaged it. However, Mahit managed to recover the chip from the body of her predecessor and now has his memories and wisdom in her thoughts. But she can't let the imago official know her imago has been restored.

And then the empire recalls Mahit as ambassador and linguist to assist in making contact with their alien opponents, hoping they can end the war. Once again we are thrust into the internal battles for supremacy between various ministries and people seeking power. Martine proves to be a master of this high stakes political intrigue.

Martine is reunited with envoy Three Seagrass and they are taken to the battleship at the head of the war. Their role is to try to communicate with the aliens. Meanwhile, back at the capital, there are others who want to bomb the alien planet with enough destructive power to destroy it completely. And since when does the eleven year old future emperor think he has the authority to get involved in the affairs of adults?

The book has been fast paced from the beginning but something happens and all forward momentum stops as many different plot points suddenly coalesce and everybody has to rethink their part.

There is a phrase in writing that says, 'Somebody has to put the gun on the mantleshelf'. It means you can't write a sudden escape hatch into a story, you have to do the set up ahead of time. Martine has been 'putting guns on the mantleshelf' since book #1. And with the main players in the palace and in the control deck of the leading battle ship, everything is brought to a halt, and here comes the payoff.

The final chapter ends on such a calm note that it almost robs the overall story of its power. But there is a Postlude that brings it all to a very fitting conclusion - just enough mystery, just enough information, just enough satisfaction.

The word 'byzantine' is often used as an adjective to describe a highly complex and convoluted plot in literature. These two books definitely fit that description as the various power players outplay and sidestep each other. And having delighted in reading these two books of interweaving character arcs in their battles for supremacy, it is fitting to find that Arkady Martine is not only an esteemed scholar but has a PhD in Byzantine history, and that the first book was written through the time she was studying for that Doctorate. I knew we were in the hands of a master of her craft.

A remote mining station that sits in an asteroid belt sends Mahit, a new ambassador, to the seat of the empire. On arrival she finds that her predecessor is dead, but nobody will tell her the manner of his death. The emperor is old and there is a growing political instability as senior politicians maneuver themselves into positions of power.

Mahit is anything but compliant and as she moves between levels of power in the capital she has two dominating thoughts. First, her predecessor was more than he seemed. And second, the people who targeted him are also after her. If only she could figure out why.

Mahit's home station is virtually invisible to the empire and similarly, Mahit is invisible to most of the people of the capital. As she finds herself becoming friends with two locals, so the mining station rises in significance to the story. The author has cleverly blended Mahit's visibility in the capital with the steady reveal that the mining station held something valuable. And it was that certain valuable thing that put Mahit at the centre of the action.

Arkady Martine has given us a masterful work of political intrigue. She has served up a world of power and suspicion, of privilege and discrimination, of subtle language and, I kid you not, poetry.

There are a few things that took me some time to get used to. First is the names of members of the empire. They are all formed from a number and a noun. For instance, Six Direction, Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea. I found this convention very distracting. Second thing is the Aztec influenced spelling. It's the Teixcalaanli Empire, and there are many instances of similarly Aztec sounding words, cuecuelehui, ahachotiya, ezuazuacat. They were not a problem in themselves but my 'English only' brain would stumble on them. The quality of the story was worth laying aside these distractions and letting Martine's writing beguile me.

Rachel works with the British Secret Service and she's found out there is a mole she needs to track down. Trouble is, he's dead. And how do you chase down a dead man? With the help of other dead people, of course.

In a world where the afterlife is accessible through tech advances, Rajaneimi gives us a high stakes spy novel that crosses the boundary between life and death. While the British are trying to maintain the post-passing city, the Russians are developing an artificial deity that will bring it all down.

Set in 1938 and with the backdrop of the Spanish civil war looming dangerously overhead as the battle ground between the life vs the death advocates, the story dances between politics, social upheaval, and the conundrums of advanced mathematics. Rajaneimi has advanced degrees in mathematics and physics so we will allow him this indulgence.

The plot increases speed as it advances, and what starts out as a rather whimsical story populated with pompous British snobs develops into a rapid 'fire and response' mystery as we try to work out what is really happening, hoping we can keep up with the recklessness of the characters.

And at the end? No spoilers, of course, but this is not the ending you were looking for.

Biopunk at it's finest. The world of the not so distant future has survived the 'decade of plagues', a time when countless people died. One company has risen to dominate the health scene and it keeping billions of people alive with biochips that monitor and treat any hint of disease that appears.

Inara has an inherited protein deficiency that means her body produces cancer cells at an alarming rate. She lives in a commune, Darkome, where people resist the dominance of the biochip and they research and treat disease themselves. Her mother died of cancer and Inara is rushing to complete their shared research to stop her disease.

When she is forced to choose between family, health, and Darkome, things take a disturbing turn. She finds that her body is able to intervene and ignore any medical intervention, changing her DNA on the fly, and she is on the way to understanding how to turn that to her advantage. Trouble is, there are other people who want to know how she does it. They only want her body, they just don't want her.

Inara tries to maintain her own autonomy but finds herself as a pawn being played by forces that want domination on the world scene.

As the book came towards the ending I mused that Rajaniemi had better finish things up here or he will run out of space. The story rushed to a conclusion and the last three words were, 'To be continued'. Darkome was published only three months ago. Looks like a longish wait for the continuation.

Rajaniemi has a winner of a story here and his prose is captivating. Where his Quantum Thief trilogy was dense and opaque, this story is Windex clear and leads the reader through a maze of technology and biology with ease. The hard science never gets in the way of the story and Inara shines as a relatable person. I found myself torn between reading nonstop to the end or taking breaks so I could stay longer in the story. It was totally delicious.

A razor sharp novella that reads as if it's coated in teflon. Napper serves up a grim cyberpunk world in a futuristic Melbourne that spreads out across the Nullabor and ends with the reader asking, "Is this some happy ending or is it something I should be very worried about?"

Jack is the son of Vietnamese migrants, and that is where any follow-on from Napper's previous 36 Streets starts and ends. He's a small time crook who gets swept up in a matter of international importance. Trouble is, all he did was steel a pair of shoes. Within days he's being pursued by firstly a modern day ninja, then a carload of corrupt police officers, and then anonymous men in black four wheel drives. It's the full catastrophe.

And there's also Sally. She thought she was merely giving a ride to a fellow university student. Melbourne uni is not what it used to be.

As Jack and Sally race across the country Napper spices up their existence with the unexpected presence of a sentient AI. So it seems we now have three people in the car, each one trying to work out what went wrong and how they are going to fix things.

This is a book that I wanted to go on well after it ended. The characters are real people, the pace is rapid and the story takes them into dark places. As Napper delves into what it might mean to have an AI implant adding to human brain power his treatment of the topic is well balanced and always on point for the story.

The bones of a good story but brought down by poor writing. This was highlighted for me as I had just finished Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. Lehane is a master of prose and very definitely a hard act to follow.

The book opens with a chase on foot through the city. The author tries to convey urgency and danger with complicated sentences and his grammar fails him. It's not a good first impression.

For instance, the narrator, a copper, is chasing a suspect and is referring to himself in this sentence. "Pushing forward and closing the gap, the lights of street vendors and stores blur past my vision." The grammatical subject here is 'the lights of the street vendors', not the narrator. Such clumsy grammar continues through the book.

Two sentences later we read, "Hologram advertisements dance and pulsate above autonomous vehicles designed to promote the latest thing you need to buy." Once again his grammar fails. This sentence tells me that autonomous vehicles are designed to promote the latest thing. I know that is not what he means but it is how the English language works. It is as if the author does not know how to maintain the grammatical subject through a sentence.

Both of these examples are only three or four paragraphs into the novel. And sadly such clumsy writing continues through the book. Add to this the constant use of heavy handed adjectives, I suspect for the purpose of conveying drama, and reading the book becomes tiring.

However, let's move to the story itself. Set in a dystopian world I imagine is inspired by the movie Blade Runner with a bit of cyberpunk added in, the narrator, Sol, a police officer is trying to close a case. He's pursuing a suspect through various layers of the city, from desperate poverty to the ultra rich. Body modifications are the norm for many people, some legally allowed but others most certainly not. Some of his adversaries are fully human, some of them modded to the point of being machines, and very dangerous machines. As the story unfolds Sol finds that his initial suspect leads him to levels of society that have unlimited influence in the city. Is the whole society compromised by these links to the ultra wealthy?

The story moves rapidly and Sol rushes from one crisis to another. Through it all his motivation is to provide for his wife and daughter, who are always on his mind. The author is keen to show Sol as a man of integrity with family as his prime concern. His behaviour, however, is less constant. I'm prepared to say that as an Australian, I'm not the best judge of character or actions of a US police officer. He jumps too suddenly from being calm and reasoning to volatile and chaotic for me to appreciate him as a person.

Finally, this is the debut novel of the author and I always want to support new authors. The book is let down by his prose and it could be improved with a good editor. The story has potential and if this is indicative of the imagination of the author then hopefully his next book will show some maturity of language and form.

Under the guise of writing a murder mystery thriller, Lehane gives us an extraordinary exploration of human darkness. Three boys, eleven years old, are playing in the street and something happens. Something that refuses to 'unhappen'.

As adults they live very different lives. One's a reformed criminal. One's a copper. One is just surviving, unable to throw off the darkness of the childhood experience. They rarely meet until a teenage girl is murdered. As the investigation proceeds the intertwining of their lives becomes shrouded in suspicion and alienation. They are drawn together but repulsed from each other at the same time.

Lehane writes very realistic characters. His prose is masterful as he lays open the deep emotions of these three men and their families. The plot has few twist and turns, this is not Agatha Christie dropping everything into place at the very end, it is the people that matter here. We become engaged in the lives of these disparate people, we feel with them, and we feel committed to them.

My only frustration with the book was the time it took for the setup. As Lehane fills in the stories of the three, first in childhood and then as adults, it is not until 30% of the way through that the strands start to draw together. I was engaged with the book from the start but it was not until that 30% point that I was hooked.

There was another point late in the book that he hinted at the identity of the killer. The 'means, motive, opportunity' triplets appeared on the horizon but the final reveal pulled the rug from under that idea. In the end, and after experiencing the depth of suffering of the main characters, it is the utter mundanity, the meaninglessness of the murder that hits the hardest.

This is my second Lehane novel and it certainly won't be the last.