Kim Miller

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.

Being a Monty Python fan and also a fan of Gilliam's movies, I came to this book with a positive mindset. Gilliam's work on Python meant that his animations held the screen but he didn't appear in person, so he was something of a mystery for a long time. This memoir fills out a certain amount of that mystery. From his childhood in the US to his work with Mad magazine to manipulating his excursion through the military to his adopting of England as his home, this is an overview of the story of the man.

He also traverses many of his movies with anecdotes of their making and reception. The difficulties of bringing his weird Pythonesque humour to the US market get a lot of air as he struggled to be taken seriously as a movie maker. The illustrations in the book increase through this portion of his story and his story board pics show something of his visual process.

He speaks of how his daughter was instrumental in keeping him on track when the US market wanted to trim down his more outrageous ideas, and to continue through a disaster such as when Heath Ledger died while filming Dr Parnassus. I think she was also the push for him to get this book completed. We owe her a beer next time we see her in the pub.

Afterthought. One of the funny things is how the book ends. He acknowledges 'all the people along the way who pushed me forward...' and he lists about a thousand actors over several pages. Yep, I counted them. Well, I copied them all into a word processor and halved the word count.

This was my first Tim Mead book and the third in a series of this detective and stage magician pair-up. Set in 1938 it was a bit Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than a Midsomer Murders episode. Lots of twists, lots of victims, lots of guilty parties. And a surprise ending that told us that we should have been asking more questions all the way through.

This was the review I put on another site after a bit more thought:

Set in 1938 and mostly in a grand English country house it's like Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than Midsomer Murders. And also more over-contrived ways of killing people. And also more murderers than Christie ever needed. It's quietly funny, simply because of the way it pokes fun at the Christie world. The detective is partnered by a stage magician, one has the crime experience and the other knows how to understand misdirection and illusion. I took it kind of seriously at first but started to see the absurdity slowly building up by the halfway mark. And then he drops a very unexpected ending, and then he drops another even more unexpected ending, and then a third unexpected ending. He knows how to overkill.

A short novelette about Hadrian in the years he spent on Jadd. A prince of another star system approaches the ruler of Jadd to seek an alliance. He's brought gifts, genetically engineered birds who can sing with human voices. Some of them have hidden talents, and the prince himself has a trick or two up his sleeve.

I didn't think this the best of Ruocchio's short fillers. There's a lot of description of beautiful plumage but his gift of telling stories of political intrigue is not having its best showing in this one.

I think this is the debut novel from Bauer. It's the first of a series in a 'destroyed world' type of story. Climate change is freezing the world into a new ice age, only some people escape. The book suffers from having everything explained in terms of numbers: how many people can fit in this spaceship, how large a volume needs to be to hold this forest, how much space needs to be given over to food manufacture, etc. He has a wide array of characters drawn from around the world who face orchestrating a rescue in the face of a rapidly advancing catastrophe.

It seems that Bauer is looking for hard scifi but his process gets in the way. I'll watch out for the second book as i would like him to succeed, the world needs more Aussie authors.

This is my first Jasper Fforde and I think an early work of his. I took it up as I was looking for something comedic after a heavier read and this appeared popular. I had trouble for much of it. Fforde is trying so self-consciously hard to be clever and witty that the imaginative story suffers for it. I was prepared to cut him some slack and continued and it improved from about the half way point.

It's a time travel novel where somebody is going back into original manuscripts of classic novels and removing characters. Thursday Next is the agent who is tracking down the bad guy. Her weird name is only one of many such unfunny puns. Other people are Sturmey Archer and Bowden Cable, both items of bicycle engineering. Yep, painful, no?

There are two themes running through the story. One is an ongoing discussion between Next and other characters about who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It's an oft repeated discussion point. Second theme is the story of Jane Eyre, especially the ending that people did not like. I hadn't read Jane Eyre but it sounded false to me.

As the book came to an end Fforde's finest humour came to the fore. The real author of Shakespeare's plays becomes known, although only to Next. And the ending of Jane Eyre is resolved to everybody's satisfaction in a great plot twist.

This novella follows on from Ashes of Man and is the best of the novellas in the series. It tells the story of Lorien Aristedes after he engineered the rescue of Hadrian.

It begins with Lorien already having been tried and entered into his sentence. The book starts out dark and gets progressively darker as Ruocchio strips Lorien of his dignity and ultimately his humanity. As Lorien is ground into the dust by his circumstances and the people around him the inner surety that has carried him in previous episodes also retreats from him. He is thrown into suffering and forced into performing actions that he would never have countenanced in his former life.

Next to Kingdoms of Darkness, this is the darkest story of the series so far and totally compelling. It was a two session read for me, and had I started it early in the day it would have been a single session to complete. It confirms to me that Ruocchio is at his best in longer form stories rather than shorts.

This is the best so far of the short story fill-ins of Sun Eater. The stories are sharper and add more into the overall drama of the main novels. Each story builds into some aspect of the whole.

Whether the story of a main character who was left behind, the story of a soldier who is confronted and transformed by an age-old god of the Cielcin, the story of a knight of the Empire who confronts the extrasollarians who build clones so that they can later use their body parts, or the story of a young woman who is growing into the true daughter of her exiled father, these stories merge into the Sun Eater series more perfectly than the stories in the other collections.

I went looking for something funny to read and this popped up. It started out wacky crazy insanity with lots of laughs. Then it turned to blood and guts everywhere comedic horror, although it felt like the author was trying for something higher. It hit a bit of a turning point at the 75% mark with a remembered tale of high school violence and I was close to DNF at that point. However, it improved in style and became a bit more cohesive as the protagonists realised they were about to save the universe. The closing sequence was very clever - the bit on the basketball court - where they (and us) realise that somebody else could have done a much better job.

Young Kathreen has been captured in an interplanetary invasion and taken to another planet by her captors. Here, with other victims, she will work in the mines, digging out a dangerous and mysterious substance. Suddenly a chance opens up for her to assume the identity of the child of a noble. She takes it. Thus starts her journey of revenge.

The book suffers, in my estimation, from several graphic depictions of child abuse and torture. It is part of the plot structure in that we need to know what drives Kathreen's thirst for revenge and justice, but graphic violence towards children is a tricky subject to navigate.

The story arc of Kathreen is well thought out and developed and we see her rise in power to the point where she faces for herself the difficulty of maintaining power without becoming the next tyrant.

This is my first DNF for longer than I can remember. I bought what I thought was SciFi but was what started out a Victorian London era horror story. Very soon the protagonist was heading towards taking the life of a newborn baby so he could reanimate his recently deceased wife. That was enough for me to stop.