Kim Miller

I read this at the recommendation of a friend who likes it so much that he buys copies to give away to friends. However, MacDonald's language is to archaic for me to really appreciate his style of literature.

Lilith was a mythical figure and Adam's first wife, created from dust as was Adam, but she wouldn't submit to him and was banished so God then made Eve from Adam's rib.

Lilith continues in some mythical stories as a rebellious temptress. But MacDonald asks, can Lilith find redemption? Long story short, she does in the end. And that's it from me.

PKD does it again. In a far future where humans are colonising the planets they need to be 'chemically encouraged' with the drug Can-D to maintain their lives in the boredom of life on the bleakest places imaginable. The principle drug involves sitting around a playing board called a Layout - think of Monopoly in 3D - and engaging with each other as the drug blanks their minds and takes them into the game.

Palmer Eldritch is a mystical figure who enters the story with a new drug called Chew-Z that he says eclipses anything else. Of course he wants to sell it because of course he does. But Chew-Z does not require a Layout, and the Layout marketers don't like it.

It sounds like a silly plot but PKD works his magic and we enter the typical PKD world where we question the difference between human sentience and whatever other alternatives are presented.

The place where it all started. Gibson throws his unsuspecting readers into the gritty world of cyberspace. If only we'd been warned. Ironically written in 1984, Gibson's view of the future is dark and dangerous. It's a world of cyberhacking into the brains of others and neural enhancements for those who can afford it. And running underneath the human drama is the goal of an artificial intelligence that is becoming sentient and wants to merge with the only other AI that can match and complete it.

Yep, the humans want computer enhancements built in, and the computers want to be humans. OK, I didn't get that a bit quite right. The computers want to be greater than humans.

This book demands a lot of its readers, but pays off in the end.

Consider that downloading your consciousness into a computer was possible. That means you could live forever, as long as somebody maintained that computer. Now imagine that a rich guy employed a software developer to write a software package that was self-preserving and could not be destroyed because it was deployed across some vast system, and in that package were various levels of habitat for downloads to live. Forever is now becoming more of a possibility.

Welcome to Permutation City. What could possibly go wrong?

A collection of short stories that fit into the world of Reynold's novel, House of Suns. Each story finds a place and time within the original saga and fills in a bit of some of the characters. I didn't find that any particular story set up a future element of the original book, so they are engaging to read but are not necessary for continuity.

One summer evening the children of some industrial scientists are outside on the lawn while their parents are having a dinner party. They notice that the stars suddenly go out. The adults inside have missed the most significant thing to happen in human history.

The book follows the world's exploration into what has happened and the path followed by the families of the children. It is slowly revealed that something very dangerous is happening to the solar system and the Earth is being protected from some imminent collapse.

The children follow different paths into adult life, all trying to deal with the catastrophe. Some chase scientific research, some join a religious cult, some seek answers through the terraforming of Mars.

Wilson has given us a magnificent story of hard science fiction woven around an exploration of what humanity thinks is fundamentally important when faced with the possibility of total destruction.

I saw the TV series and loved it. And I'm a fan of both Gaiman and Pratchett, so reading the original story was essential.

The TV followed the book much more than most adaptations and the two are slavishly similar. However, the TV 'final conflict' scenes between the boy, the four horsemen, and the devil are much better than the book's portrayal.

This book hooked me early and held me until the end. In a far future Abigail clones herself into 999 other 'shatterlings'. Although they share her gene structure the clones can be either male or female and the original person is somewhere among them. The clones then take to space in separate space ships and over the next several million years they regularly meet up.

The book is told from the viewpoint of two main characters who are both clones, one female and one male. They are in a relationship, which is generally frowned upon in the clone community. The original story of Abigail as a child and into adulthood is spread through the novel.

These two are both late to a reunion and find destroyed spaceships and the debris of battle floating in space. The goal then is to save who they can and to find the perpetrators and the reasons for the attack.

Reynolds has a way of holding a story together over the millions of years of narrative time. His writing expands into the endless space allowed for it by the intergalactic environment.

A difficult novel to keep up with. A priest wanders into the desert outside Alice Springs to try to work through his crisis of faith. He starts to write a treatise where he imagines a conversation between two philosophers that he thinks might each have something to say to him.

Alongside that narrative is a story of living a chaotic life in inner city Sydney as a young man, weaving through the various worlds of Redfern's indigenous community, early indy rock concerts and the beginnings of community radio as people try to stake a claim in the local culture.

It reads in part as a personal memoir but uses the priest in the desert to frame a deeper sense of aimlessness and despair. It's not the easiest read but rewards the concentration needed to see it through.

Shteyngart's telling of a future where the US has suffered financial collapse and is under the control of foreign national banks who are taking over everyday life. And Russian immigrant Lenny has fallen in love with Korean immigrant Eunice. They try to keep their struggling relationship alive on social media. Much of the novel is social media posts that demand the reader to keep up.

His characteristic satire once again rules the page in a weird but brilliant story.

Campbell is an Australian TV journalist who dreamed of becoming a war correspondent. He gets the job as his news outlet's man in Moscow. And from there he travels to various places in Russia and under Russian influence, wherever the news takes him. Things get very dangerous as his team heads into an all too real conflict and his cameraman is killed by a bomb blast. It's a memoir that starts out with a dream and ends in a nightmare.

Shteyngart has a way of making the most ridiculous fictional story sound real. He digs into his Russian heritage to tell of a Soviet republic selling its oil to a multinational company. His father in this telling is an influential criminal who manages to dupe the company into believing all those oil wells out there are sitting on a mass of oil. "It's all yours for the right price." It's a tale of one betrayal after another as the author tries to crawl out from underneath his father's mess.

Shteyngart was born in Russia and was a child when his family moved to the US. This is his memoir of his early life and beyond written in his particular style of making things satirical, sad and funny all at the same time. It's the story of a constant misfit finding his way in a world that probably doesn't want him.

This book is a total romp - if you are a Deadpool fan. If Deadpool is not for you then this book will be a real turn-off. It starts with a content warning of depictions of violence, sexual content, and explicit language.

A bonkers mix of the time loop of Groundhog Day, the foul language, sarcastic humor and death recovery of Deadpool, and an Earthling magicked to a world of orcs and furries.

Davi has lived through hundreds of lives, and every time she dies, usually from torture, she awakens in the same pond of freezing water and the same wizard hails her as the one to save them all. Trouble is, she keeps on dying instead of saving. So this time she decides she will become the Dark Lord from whom everyone needs to be saved.

This is book #2 of Chambers' Monk and Robot books. I was so impressed with #1 that I got into this the next day. It doesn't have the consistency of #1 as it tends to drag a little at about the 75% mark. However is finishes well and the ending explains a bit of those slower parts.

Tea Monk Dex and Robot Mosscap met in the wilderness as Dex was in a time of crisis. Mosscap proved to have greater understanding of Dex than Dex did. In this book they continue as travel companions, now out of the wilderness and visiting villages along the road. Mosscap's goal is to find out how the humans are doing with the question, "What do you need?" As they travel the two companions go more deeply into their own responses to that question.

Where book #1 dealt with personal identity and meaning, #2 deals with community, family, and friendship. Once again the deeply human is opened up by Chambers to try to understand why these fundamental relationships can be so difficult.

This book is a total delight. It is the second I've read of this author and has what I imagine is her characteristic quirkiness coupled with a deeply optimistic humanity.

The setting is a far post-robot future. The robots did not take over the world but have left to live their own lives and the humans have them only as a distant history.

Sibling Dex is a Tea Monk who travels around nearby towns and sets up shop, listening to people's troubles and blending them soothing tea. Dex has no gender - Sibling replaces Brother or Sister. Dex is restless and decides to travel to a distant pilgrimage shrine that might no longer exist. Somewhere along the abandoned road a robot approaches and says, 'What do you need?'

And so begins an unexpected friendship. The genderless human and the robot who sees itself as an 'it'. Without any socially constructed identities and in an abandoned shrine the troubled Dex learns to listen to himself and find inner peace. The monk learns meaning in life from the robot and the robot's first question, 'What do you need?' is not so strange after all.

A collection of short stories that sit between books #2 and #3 of the Sun Eater series. These stories lack the fire of the novels and this collection is not up to the level of previous novellas, The Lesser Devil (set parallel to book #1) and Queen Amid Ashes (set after book #2).

There is a long time gap between novels #2 and #3 and Ruocchio has set Queen and these short stories into the gap to explain some of the intervening time. I've been reading them before I get into book #4 and they recede too far into the past, but the way they've dealt with piecemeal events has been frustrating when compared to the power of the main series.

This is one of the filler novellas sitting after Book#2 of the Sun Eater series. Hadrian Marlowe has been made a Knight of the Empire and given a high class space ship and sent off to mop up after a Cielcin invasion of a distant planet. The Cielcin fleet has been blown apart by Empire forces and their main worldship has disappeared into hyperspace.

He finds the planet devastated and the main city burnt to ashes. The Baroness who rules the planet is hiding with many thousands of her retainers and general population in underground tunnels.

It is when he is clearing out the remaining Cielcin that he makes a horrifying discovery and in that moment his whole purpose on the planet has changed. Hadrian has to take his newly given authority as a Knight of the Empire to an expected level as he seeks to give the planet a new future.

The story ends suddenly at the 75% mark and the rest is back-matter. There is a long history of the Marlowe dynastic line with a reference to the erroneous claim by some that they are descendants of Christopher Marlowe the English playwright of the 1500s. Coincidentally, Hadrian's new space ship is called the Tamerlane, similar to the original Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great'. Some characters in Hadrian's story are similarly named after characters in that play.

Other back-matter sections are various personae and a thesaurus of Ruocchio's terms.

In Empire of Darkness, book #1 of the Sun Eater Series, we meet Hadrian Marlowe and his priggish younger brother Crispin. Hadrian leaves their home planet and Crispin is lost to the story. In this filler novella that sits between #1 and #2 of the series, Crispin is given space to fill in his own story.

An enemy from the past emerges with a new threat and Crispin is thrown into the head of the battle. He proves to be a much more rounded person, a competent leader, and a man of mercy and integrity, attributes that were nowhere to be found when we first met him.

This is the second book I choose from among the many books being banned in US schools. I'm Australian and have limited understanding of how the US school system works. But I don't like what I see when any person can have books banned from school libraries even though they have no children in that school, and even from out of state.

Flamer is based on the author's own experience. Aiden is fourteen, part Asian and a bit chubby, and he's at Scout camp for the summer. He's about to move from middle school to high school and is scared that the bullying he's already receiving will get worse.

SPOILERS from here.

Even worse than the bullying is that living for weeks in close proximity to other boys he's starting to have new feelings for his best friend with whom he shares a tent. The conversations and repartee between this bunch of teen boys is already packed with sexual innuendo and open comments about various girls at school etc, and in this highly charged environment Aiden's thoughts are running wild.

One of the leaders is gone from the campsite and conversations focus on the possibility that he was gay and therefore evil. Aiden sinks into depression under all the assumptions that flood the meal table. He writes a goodbye letter, takes a pocket knife and heads for the lonely chapel on the hill. His favourite Marvel character appears in his mind and reveals inner strength that he didn't know he had.

This is an extraordinary book. I have gay friends who have spoken of how hard they found their life when all they hear is accusations and threats. It can be a teenager's nightmare. Rather than ban this book I would suggest schools promote it. I found it very moving and see the very real possibility that it might save some teen's life.

Four residents of a senior living village decide they want to investigate unsolved murders. Luckily they represent a range of backgrounds and abilities that seem to fit together like a Tetris game. With a bit of manipulation they recruit the community liaison Police officer who comes to teach them to lock their doors at night. And the game is on.

This is a 'cosy detective story' in the tradition of The Number One Ladies Detective Agency series by MCall Smith. The people are delightful, if somewhat one dimensional. The police vacillate between dismissive and accommodating. The murders are many and varied and the investigation is highly intuitive but ultimately successful. And the amateur sleuths retain secrets at the end that the police won't uncover.

Osman has a way of story telling that is engaging and funny. We start out loving the characters and we still love them when their flaws are revealed. However, I was left with the feeling that murder is OK as long as the victim deserved it.

A darkly comic view of free will and purpose in life.

Malachi Constant has extraordinary luck in getting rich. In truth, he buys shares and stock by reading the Bible from the beginning and finding companies that match words as he progresses. His reasoning is that God is making him rich. Winston Rumfoord is already super rich and has his own space ship. Malachi loses his fortune and Winston manipulates him from that moment.

There is a prediction linking Malachi and Winston's wife, a war with Mars, a trip to Mercury, and time on Saturn's moon Titan. And it's all because of Winston. Oh yeah, there's also a sentient alien robot with his own space ship.

Remember when a steak and salad at a pub meant iceberg lettuce and beetroot but now it's three different varieties of rocket and some weird stuff called quinoa and we ask, "What is all this stuff doing here?" That's what this book is like. Vonnegut chucks together so many bits and pieces and expects it all to hold together with meaning. OK, he's good at that sort of thing. He just keeps chucking new things in and I could imagine him saying "You think I can't do this? Just watch me. And you will keep reading anyway." Smug bastard.

He ends the book with the thought that "the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

I picked this up because the book I'd just read (Ruoochio's Howling Dark) was such a heavy hitter and I wanted some relief. Sirens of Titan is weird comedy until it's not. Things got rather dark towards the end.

This is book 2 of the Suneater Series. Hadrian Marlowe continues to be tipped from one disaster to another. This time he's searching for links to the enemy from book #1 on a planet that nobody else believes actually exists, "it's only a myth" they say. And it's a big galaxy we live in. Things get very dark as this book proceeds and it left me reeling for days. I'm loving this series.

No spoilers here but the title of #1, Empire of Silence, seemed inappropriate to me as I read the book as Hadrian's Empire is very warlike. But towards the end something happens and the phrase appears for the only time in the book. But it's still a mystery. This second title, Howling Dark is the same. There seems to be no place where the title hits home until towards the end when the phrase appears for the only time. And with a bit of thought I realised it refers to the mystery of the first title. Now my mind is saying 'Ha, so is this a hint of where the whole series is pointing?"

I saw an interview with Taylor recently and it prompted me to get this book.

Taylor was a Congressional Page at age 16, the kids who run papers back and forth between congress members. He completed post graduate study at Oxford and joined the Dept of Homeland Security as Chief of Staff when it was established after 9/11. He was still there when Trump came to power, something he resisted from the beginning.

The book tells of the 'Axis of Adults' who tried to keep the guardrails up around Trump for the following years. Through that time he'd written a revealing OpEd for the New York Times under the name Anonymous and after that a book called Warning, also as Anonymous. This book is the story of his time in the administration as one of the officials trying to contain Trump's erratic decisions and self-serving excesses, how he made the decision to leave, and the consequences of going public. It's a whole lot more scary than I had imagined.

This one has raised a storm of fake rage in the US states where book banning is the new normal. So I decided to check it out.

It's a graphic novel of a woman's memoir about growing up non-binary. She is three years old at the beginning when her family moves to a backwoodsy house with no electricity, water, etc. Her parents are kind of hippie but well educated. At the end of the book she is approaching thirty and considering top surgery.

Her life is one of continuing identity crises as she struggles to fit in but feels she is pushed into silence about herself. While I can see that the religious bigotry of the US would hate the book, it seems to me to fill a real need with young people trying to navigate their way through the minefield of opinions versus the emerging genetics and neuroscience of how bodies and brains are gendered in utero.