Kim Miller

In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', Jekyll is worried about his dark side and tries to slice off that part of his personality, creating the monstrous Hyde in the process. Tim Major takes these characters and envisages them as a pair of investigators to explore the dark side of humanity.

The wealthy Muriel Carew attends a fund raiser party at a London mansion where she encounters her ex-fiance, Henry Jekyll. Suspicious stuff happens and on leaving the party she finds a dead body. Following up her suspicions, and with a few more clues, she finds her way to the obscure office of Hyll Investigations, the current workplace of her ex.

People in 1890s London have been reported missing. Their families have been contacting Jekyll to find them. And now Muriel is awkwardly imposing herself into his work. She proves to be a better investigator and together they stumble through Victorian London to discover the whereabouts of the missing, either alive or dead.

It is the nature of these abductions that gives Major his grist for the mill as he walks us down the stairs into some horrific basement of human desire and cruelty.

The two characters of Jekyll and Hyde form a symbiotic pair, one working in daylight and the other in darkness. Each one knows nothing of the thinking of the other but Muriel interacts with both, a complicated trick that Major handles well.

The novel carries itself well for the most part but I thought it lost some punch towards the end. The final crisis is sold short as the depravity behind the abductions is revealed and the denouement lets us down rather gently.

Set one hundred years into the future, China has invaded Vietnam and is twenty years into a heavy handed occupation. Lin, born in Vietnam but adopted and raised in Australia, has returned and works within a chaotic insurgency. She's a gang member and Bao, the powerful gang leader, is training her for leadership in battle.

I came to this book from the world of Gibson's Sprawl books, but whereas in Gibson the brutalism is in the overall environment (images of the Blade Runner movie), the brutalism in 36 Streets is in the damage being inflicted by various enemies on each other. It's more like a Bruce Lee world of wounding, dismemberment, and murder.

Into that world Napper injects mind enhancement through sophisticated software, future-tech body repair and modification, and a darkly envisaged computer game that is undermining a nation's trust in itself.

Lin has been hired by the developer of the computer game to find whoever murdered his business partner but as she delves deeper into the game and the people around it she finds herself bouncing between her gang, its street rival, the Viet Minh resistance, and the Chinese occupying forces.

Lin picks up a DNA fragment from Molly Millions, and there's a polite nod to 'tears in rain'. As I understand it the book was part of Napper's PhD thesis on cyberpunk and referencing his source worlds is fitting, and done respectfully.

Set in the Sprawl, the world of Gibson's Neuromancer, but easier to read. Neuromancer set the stage for this book but it was dark and complicated and for an introduction to cyberpunk it was difficult to grasp. Count Zero has dark moments but it is not as opaque as its predecessor.

Count Zero is a young man who wants to be a cyber hacker, a Cowboy. He's given some software to explore that turns out to have a secret danger. Once he's been exposed to the power behind the code there is no escape from the people who now pursue him.

The story has three prongs: the young hacker, an art dealer on the trail of a mysterious sculptor, and a mercenary employed to abduct a scientist from a rival company. Inevitably they come together in an explosive climax, having left a lot of dead bodies in their respective wakes.

Where Neuromancer threaded the reader through a dark underworld, Count Zero has everything out in the open - 4 1/2 exploding helicopters from me.

This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.

In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.

The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.

The stranger speaks of things he could not normally know and has a wisdom that is beyond 13 year old boys - such things as "that behavior is not inflammable. People do not burn in hell for that reason by itself." Such sayings make the local boy think that perhaps this new friend who now lives with his family really is the devil after all.

The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of rising paranoia and of people torn apart even from their inner selves.

And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.

Ten stories, three of which are set in Gibson's Sprawl world of Neuromancer. They vary in content and there are some winners.

We have to think back to the time before the cyber world became a reality for these stories. The stories paint a future where corporations have overtaken government and personal autonomy, but these are increasingly our own reality. Apple and Amazon churn out cheap products at the expense of those who make them and we are mostly OK with that because it benefits us. The 2024 American election resulted in Elon Musk becoming a non-elected 'assistant president' and he wants to control everything.

Putting these issues aside, the stories have some deeply human moments. Gibson writes emotions into his stories in a way that makes the reader retain empathy for the characters once the book is closed.

As humans everywhere start dying in a zombie apocalypse a different kind of narrator steps up to tell us what happened. Say "Hello" to S.T. the pet crow. His master is dead and with the pet bloodhound he goes exploring.

The premise was engaging for a while but the writing let it down. The zombie thing was caused by some kind of virus that was animated by 'too much screen time' as if this was a cautionary tale. Ho hum. Then there was the constant use of the word, 'murder'. OK, so a group of crows is called a murder but the constant use of the word became tiresome. The humour tends to the juvenile end of things, such as S.T. stands for Shit Turd, which is a pity as the sadder parts of the story need a more adult balance.

There was also a sense of aimlessness through the book. S.T. didn't have any goal, he just wandered through most of the story and refused help until it was forced upon him. Even to write it as a hero's journey trope would have given the book more focus and direction and allowed S.T. to mature in a meaningful way.

And a hint to those wanting to write. It's OK to kill off your next to main character, but make sure it's for a good reason. Don't do it for something stupid.

Written in 1920 with all the turgid prose of the era when the author is trying to be formal and profound. It's an exploration of religion and philosophy and moral values set in a metaphorical trip to another planet.

The protagonist meets many different people with whom he debates morality, every day a new person and a new topic. Ironically he leaves several of them dead in his wake. With many he commits himself to their point of view but tomorrow changes his mind with the next interlocutor.

The end of his journey is marked by his acceptance of ultimate disillusionment.

This is a book that did not age well. H.G.Wells explores atomic power, seeing it as powering industry (atomic powered planes and cars) as well as weapons of warfare. But he wraps it in a manifesto of his thoughts on the future of humanity and one world government and the story falls dead under the weight of his postulations.

There are three main sections. First he looks at how people have powered their world through history, and how such things as steam power took a long time to emerge even when people had been seeing the lid bounce on top of a boiling kettle for centuries. And nobody ever thought, "Hey, I could use that power for something." Similarly, he tells of a man who studied glow worms and luminescence and thought, "That thing is releasing energy in small doses. I wonder how I could speed it up." And from such thoughts of radiation came atomic power.

Second section is the story of atomic bombs being dropped by hand from aeroplanes like large grenades. Because of the half life of radiation the bombs keep exploding for weeks. Most major cities are destroyed in an orgy of destruction. Had he written a complete novel on this portion alone it would have been a much better book.

Third section is a long long long diatribe about peace coming through the voluntary giving up of all political power to a single world wide authority and the people of Earth can then live in peace by focusing on art instead of farming.

There is some value in reading about his understanding of radiation etc, considering that the book was written in 1912. He gets lots of stuff wrong, and his view of the future is limited. For example, his atomic powered planes in the war he sets in 1955 are still fabric covered timber frame machines and the bombs are dropped over the side by hand by the copilot. As a writer who saw the talk of a looming war on one hand and talk of nuclear power on the other, he joined the two pretty well.

This is a fast paced story of Jazz who lives in a moon base, the town of Artemis, population about two thousand, and she seems to be the only criminal in the place. She works as a porter doing deliveries but pays the bills by smuggling. And then she's asked to take on a high stakes sabotage job by a local businessman.

Why ask a 26 year old woman to cripple your opposition? Because she seems to be the only criminal in the place. It's surely not because of her maturity, she's got the personality of a twelve year old boy living tough on the back streets of New York - brash youthful stupidity coupled with resourcefulness. And we can add in that her father has taught her his welding skills.

Andy Weir has put together an engaging story although his main character is polarizing. He supports each decision and action Jazz takes with scientific reasoning, which we accept as true because we trust him as an author and he writes a convincing story. We see the same process in Project Hail Mary, and possibly in The Martian although I've not read that one. His writing style is smooth and easy to read and this story is at a much faster pace than Project Hail Mary.

Overall, it's a heist story, a mini Ocean's Eleven or Mission Impossible. There's a main plot, a detailed plan, a list of characters with different functions to complete in a set order, the possibility of danger at every turn that can leave a lot of people very dead, and a major payoff. Things become critical towards the end because of course they do. And just as we leave a heist movie thinking, 'That was a good time', and we go for a pizza, so we also do with Artemis.

Into the world of the noir detective story comes something different. We have the dark mind of the gumshoe who varies from sardonic to sarcastic, but now we have Titans.

Titans are people who have been medically enhanced to be taller, stronger, younger, and seemingly live forever. The procedure is only available to the wealthy and well connected.

A titan has been found dead and Cal Sounder had been hired by the police to solve the politically charged case.

Harkaway takes us on a wild ride to the dark side, weaving a complex narrative that becomes increasingly confused until suddenly we see that he has hoodwinked us. And then he adds a frisson of final twist as he exits stage left grinning to himself.

Sometimes whimsical, sometimes prescient, this is a collection of stories of earthlings landing on Mars. As it progresses we realise that they are chapters of a continuing narrative with a dark undercurrent of how readily we otherise certain communities.

It's hard to set a particular date to the stories. Some seem to be set in the future and some in a bygone era of the American south.

The overall feel of the book is that I started out reading an innocent story that ended up with an unexpected sting in its tail.

This is the sequel to Hyperion, the beginning of which I considered clumsy and the ending, unintentionally absurd. That it took me more than a week to finish this book shows that it didn't engage me as it should.

The pilgrim's tale structure of #1 is gone and in place there is a new narrator, an artificial human with the DNA and mind of the poet Keats. And in using this narrative device Simmons indulges himself with quotes from Keats or other poets (I recognised a WB Yeats quote in there) through the book. So lets take a look at Keats's own view of Hyperion.

Hyperion was one of the Titans, the ancient Greek Gods who were displaced by the Olympians, and Keats wrote two poems at the end of his life, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. He was nursing his brother through 'consumption' (tuberculosis) and Keats himself died soon after from the same illness. These poems were his exploration of death and meaning. And Simmons took the poetry and the theme as the foundation for this book.

Fall of Hyperion is about the war between factions within the AI 'datasphere' that supports human life and exploration. And it's about the war between 'normal' human civilisations and the Ousters, human civilisations who have used technology to enhance their bodies and minds. And it's about the war between military command and political intrigue among the human planets and central government. Like the ancient Titan, Hyperion, some of these power structures are going to fall and be displaced by others.

Now, to the story, The pilgrims have arrived at the Time Tombs and strange things are happening. The legendary Shrike is on everyone's mind as time moves back and forth on 'time tides' bringing chaos to the valley. Circumstances separate the pilgrims from each other and the Shrike appears to some as they are alone. The outcome is not good.

The narrator Keats can use his 'cyber mind' to see what is happening in other places as his dreams log into the datasphere and the information channels there. He is the link between government and pilgrims, especially as he enhances his ability to explore data lines without having to be asleep.

However, he also dives deep into the information channels like a good cyberpunk hero and finds an AI entity willing to tell him what is really going on in the machinations between the three major AI factions at the deepest level. The information he brings back to the government changes everything they thought about the upcoming war with the Ousters.

Things rush to a head in three domains. There is a final (?) confrontation with the Shrike but Simmons almost buries the story in mundanity. There is a radical action in the war that causes mass deaths and condemns billions of people to anarchy as the price of victory. And the Time Tombs open and reveal deeper layers of mystery as the stories of the original pilgrims at last find resolution.

What an extraordinary piece of literature this is. Flanagan has written a line of history that starts back with H.G.Wells and The War of the Worlds, through to the initial thinking and development of the atom bomb, through his father's experience of being a POW in Japan working in brutal conditions until Hiroshima, and reaching back through his family history to the genocidal war against the original people of his homeland Tasmania.

His prose becomes arresting and in places I was in tears. The novel has time jumps between the things I mentioned earlier as he weaves a family history through some of the most momentous elements of the last hundred years and beyond. The consequent blending of the lives of so many people forms a mesh of humanity in which he feels uncomfortably at home.

A fast paced comedy that lives up to it's wacky title. Albert has a remote island off the south west tip of England but one day a Russian ship crashes itself on one side. The ship can't be removed and it's full of top secret stuff so Russia buys one half of the island. This creates an international diplomatic crisis so America buys the other half. Two military bases bristling at each other.

It's not long before the troops on both sides realise that their biggest shared problem is that they ran out of booze yesterday. In the traditions of McHale's Navy and MASH they pool resources and make their own.

The story is peppered with attempts to drop supplies by parachute, a visit from a US senator up the re-election, a voluptuous entertainer, the Russian tradition of throwing the shot glass into the fireplace after a toast until none remain, and it all builds to the equally crazy ending.

A madcap race through 1990s Boston as two private detectives get sucked into a political scandal that breeds a gang war, and all the while trying to stay alive. Lehane's debut novel and a racy easy to read action story.

Two politicians hire Patrick Kenzie to find a cleaning woman who has taken documents from their office and disappeared. They want the woman found and they want the documents back. By the end of the novel there must be fifty dead bodies (we lose count) in the city morgue and gallons of blood draining into the street.

The dialogue is the black humour of noir detective stories of the era, the sort where the detective looks out through the venetian blinds in high contrast black and white TV shows. There's a Porsche, a psycho guy who, luckily, is on their side, and a cast of coppers doing copper type things. All in all a fun read for a long wet afternoon.

Put a bunch of people together under a weird pretext and it won't be long before they start killing each other. This book gets likened to Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None', but it's more than a murder mystery. PKD leads us down one blind alley after another, scattering a few bodies along the way, and all the while he's laughing at us for following the wrong clues.

Fourteen members of an interplanetary mission set up a base station and find themselves isolated. They come from disparate areas of life, almost as if PKD wanted to put one of each of several tropes together - the economist, the doctor, the psychologist, the scientist and his angry wife, the seductive blond, the youthful thug, just the normal bunch of circus clowns who would soon be at each other's throats.

But then he mixes in a weird religion made for space travel where prayers are sent by radio to planets with a god-consciousness. And strange things are found on this isolated planet that don't make sense, including a building that each person sees the identifying sign on the door as something different.

The danger increases, the bodies pile up, some people disappear, and as things get more and more frantic it looks like we can see what is lying underneath the whole thing. But then he pulls another PKD trick on us, and then another one, before we realise how well we've been hoodwinked.

A scientist is sent to a conference to discuss how people see the future shaping up. There's a riot, he's wounded, he ends up in a world of weirdness. The book is a somewhat rollicking satire that boils over into absurdity and ends like some kid just rang your doorbell and ran away.

Lem has put together a book full of pretend words strung together with the skill of a carpet weaver in the Middle East. The drug addled world that he builds upon an embattled political landscape is layer on layer of misdirection to the point where everyone is totally blind to their own reality.

Mix Oliver Twist and Fagin in with an adolescent crew from Ocean's Eleven and put them into a canal city like pre-medieval Venice and have them set up a series of sophisticated heists. Pepper the story with the most imaginative swearing and cursing, black humour as they wound and main their enemies, and hide it all under the guise of a temple priest with his altar boys taking donations with which to help the poor and needy.

I've only recently heard of this twenty year old novel. It's a hoot and so well told that the author took me into places in my head that meant there were days I needed recovery time.

Locke starts out as a five year old waif in a den of child thieves. Two years later he's so good at planning heists that his master has to sell him on as he can't keep him under control. With his new master he learns to be a 'Gentleman Bastard', a surprisingly well educated con artist, and alongside his three companions they take aim at relieving the gentry of their wealth. But a new name is heard in the city as a powerful adversary slowly emerges from secrecy and many crime families fall to his will.

Locke and his friends are faced with impossible choices as disaster falls upon their shared lives. The new enemy rises and old alliances fall, but it's not until Locke finds out what this enemy has planned that he realises the danger he is in.

Two satirical darkly comedic sci fi stories of hating the stranger and the political ideology of fascism.

I R.U.R. a company makes robots to replace human workers. It does not work out well and the robots grow to superiority and revolt against the humans. It is blended with a melodromatic love story between a robot engineer and a woman who starts out trying to liberate the enslaved robots.

War of the Newts is a series of stories about the discovery of sentient water lizards in Sumatra. They are exploited by Europeans, they grow in numbers in Europe, committees seek ways to use them politically, and in the end there is a war. Capek uses the allegorical nature of the book to mirror how fascism invades the exploits other nations and peoples, or to scapegoat ethnic populations.

Both of the book are tiresome in language and structure, probably suffering the twin disadvantages of being translated from the Czech and the time difference from the original writing, 1920 and 1936.

A piece of fantasmagorical absurdity with a savage twist.

Rod McBan lives on an off-world 'Old North Australia' and owns giant diseased sheep that produce a weird drug that makes him rich. He doesn't have the telepathy of others and faces dissolution, so he sets up a plan to increase his wealth and buy the whole Earth. He travels to Earth and finds things somewhat different from expectations.

The book is filled with weird characters, weird abilities, weird events, and then more weirdness as Smith fills out every nook and cranny of the story with the unexpected. The prose drags a bit in many places - who needs two pages for a single paragraph? - and is littered with poetry and songs as various characters put their motivations into words.

Overall it's a tongue in cheek broadside of Australian outback life, culture and idiom.

My first foray into the mind of Ted Chiang. What a fascinating time. A mix of stories that stepped back and forth over the border into science fiction.

A group of miners are recruited to dig into the vault over the Earth and into heaven at the top of the tower of Babel.

A man recovers from a catastrophic event and finds he has enhanced powers of intellect, sufficient for him to become a fascination to scientists and a threat to the govt.

A linguist is asked to help negotiate conversations with aliens, only to discover that she is having memories of things that have not yet happened. The movie Arrival is based on this story.

In an alternate, almost seampunk, history a team of developers make golems, clay automatons that are powered by cabbalistic names impressed upon them.

Imagine a world where angels make regular appearances in frightening events of power that leave some people dead or injured and others miraculously healed. Would you go chasing them?

And what if you could turn off the feature in your brain that makes some people look attractive so that you could then treat all people equally?

Pulling a city along rail tracks for some strange but urgent reason, a community of people struggle to keep ahead of some un-named horror that those at the top wanted kept secret. The story started out innocently enough, then became strange and then weird before turning dangerous. At the end everything came unstuck with a final resolution that was very cleverly understated.

Based in form on Canterbury Tales, a group of pilgrims travel to the planet Hyperion, the Time Tombs and the Shrike and tell their personal stories on the way. I thought the setup was clumsily written and needed a re-write to make those initial conversations more organic.

The pilgrims and their stories cover a wide range of experiences and are told in varying voices. There is existential horror, space opera, self indulgent extravagance, noir detective, love story, and political intrigue.

By the time of story three or four we realise that there are interlinking threads between them. The last story reveals the undercurrents of manipulation and betrayal that have brought these people together.

The Time Tombs are a continuing mystery, said to be moving backward through time. They are inhabited/guarded by a blade covered monster called the Shrike. Also called the Lord of Pain, it impales victims on the Tree of Pain. The origin of the Shrike is not revealed but it appears to have been recently released and causes mass death and people are fleeing the planet.

The book ends in absurdity with the pilgrims holding hands as they walk to the Time Tombs, singing We're Off to See the Wizard. Book #2 waits in the wings.

Overall a fun read but set in a dark and dangerous world. A nerdy teenager is abducted to another planet and things go wrong. Pretty standard stuff there, but Witham throws in some mystery, 'What happens to that guy from the first chapter?', and 'Who does everybody think this teenager is anyway?'.

There is a fantasmagoria of creatures, a frilly polka dot dressed rhino, talking cat people, crocodile enforcers, and more spiders than necessary, the full catastrophe. It's a book of excess from start to finish and I get the impression that Witham is happily trolling the genre, all the way to the cliffhanger ending.

I'm looking forward to Book 2 in what I believe is a trilogy.

Book 6 of The Suneater series. What a trip.

Elements of Hadrian's travels that were scattered through his overall story are coming together and he's beginning to understand what he's really been fighting for, and fighting against. Ruocchio puts his skill as a story teller on display here as he continues to drop Hadrian into ever increasing levels of danger. Each chapter reveals another undercurrent, another clandestine agreement between his enemies, another reason to continue into further danger. As the book closes we have a new understanding of the horrific nature of his task.

This series starts out strong and Ruoccio increases his muscle with each volume. It's as if he's re-writing the landscape of his genre and setting a new baseline against which others will be judged.