Kim Miller

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.

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.