Kim Miller
In the 1800s a sailing ship named Demeter is among the icebergs up the coast of Norway, looking for something. There's a serious accident. Next chapter it starts all over again. A steam ship named Demeter is sailing up the coast of Patagonia, looking for something. There's a serious accident. Next chapter it starts all over again. Early 1900s, a Zeppelin named Demeter is exploring a giant ice rift in Antarctica, something goes very wrong. Dr Silas Coade is the ship's physician each time, and he's the only person who remembers that 'we've been here before'.
Also, when does the scifi start? I didn't sign up for some sea captain shipwreck story. Reynolds is a master at telling a tale that circles a high stakes crisis while keeping the heart of the story hidden as we inch closer to the truth. This one caught my imagination so that I could not put it down. It was finished in less than two days.
Book three in Rajaniemi's Flambeau trilogy.
The first line: "Alone on the timeless beach, Joséphine Pellegrini finds herself disappointed by the end of the world." After all her hard work. A bit of a fizzer as it turned out.
The second in Rajaniemi's Flambeau trilogy. I read the three as one story. And my comments about #1, The Quantum Thief, also apply here.
The first line of the book: "That night, Matjek sneaks out of his dream to visit the thief again." Once again it begins with a 'what on earth does that mean?' line, and continues the same throughout.
This is book 1 of the Jean Le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Flambeur was the character known as Lupin, The Gentleman Thief, in books from about 1900. His character has been used in movies, even by Japan's Ghibli Studios, and a French miniseries on SBS a few years ago. He's a mysterious master of disguise character who keeps bobbing up and stealing very valuable things, while simultaneously solving crimes for the police. In this series, Rajaniemi has thrown him into the far post-human future where consciousness is uploaded into software and people live in multiple bodies enhanced by nanobots etc. It's very hard SciFi that almost demands a level 11 on the Mohs Scale.
Rajaniemi is relentless in writing a riveting story in a distant and strange setting but all the while giving absolutely no information on what his tech language means. You either keep up or you get left behind. It's reminiscent of Charles Stross but with much better prose. At about the 30% mark of the first book I was starting to get the hang of it and by the end I was charged up enough to go straight into the second one, and then the third.
The first line of the book: "As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk." And the mystery of what this means keeps up through the whole book.
A great read by an author who I really appreciate for his ability to infuse the bleakest scenario with humanity and warmth. Human development sees everyone move to live on Jupiter, leaving the Earth to dogs and ants and robots. The dogs are the authors, and they are in a continuing debate about whether the mythical 'humans' ever really existed.
It was written as a bunch of related stories for a SciFi magazine over several years. Then he added an intro to each story to blend them into a whole as if they were consecutive chapters.
Bit of a disappointment, really. A bunch of puns spread through it was about the only indication Pratchett was in the room. That, and the thing where the 'stepper' that moves people between different dimensions is powered by a potato. But the scooting between alternate dimensions seemed like a travelogue of 'Tuesday, Must be Belgium'. It finished on an interesting note, but was it interesting enough to send me to the next book in the series? Not so far.
A giant space ship leaves Earth to colonise a distant planet. After 250 years and several generations of the community of 18,000 people, the planet is near. Of course, it's all going to go as planned, isn't it? Come on, you all know it isn't. An autocratic Governor of the community, a ship's captain who seems to be nowhere, a security officer trying to climb to power, a dedicated project scientist trying to be heard, and a bunch of misfits who have won the lottery of being alive at the final approach. But what if the planet has other plans? And remember HAL from that other movie? Yeah, don't worry about that.
How the complaining hero saved the earth from dissolution. It got a bit too 'deus ex machina' for me. And then it finished with a chapter that should have been called, 'Be careful what you wish for' as they dropped the hero into a life of regret.
This was like wading through porridge from the get go, until part way in I looked it up on Wikipedia where they have a chapter by chapter synopsis. Once I got an idea of where it was heading the reading got easier. Accelerando is a music term meaning, keep getting faster from here. The book is hard SciFi about the rapidity of AI taking over human consciousness, starting from neural implants to full downloading of the person into software to the point of being able to split off multiple copies of yourself. He packs every sentence with crazy terminology and new concepts so that many sentences don't make sense, although page by page it's somehow coherent. There's a famous sentence in writing, 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' which is nonsense as a sentence and filled with self-negations even though it is grammatically correct. That is this book in a nutshell.
About two thirds the way through I suddenly thought, "This is one giant piss-take. He's filling the story with all this crazy stuff and all the while sitting there with a smirk thinking, 'See, I'm still doing it to you.'
Hadrian Marlowe is the son of a planetary governor. His father has plans for his life, Hadrian has other ideas. Every decision he makes takes him out of the frying pan and into the ... into the next frying pan over a different fire. The narrative is fast paced as he tries to plan, manipulate, and luck his way into a more desirable future.
It's fifteen thousand years into the future, humans have colonised countless star systems along one arm of the galaxy, there is genetically engineered perfection for the elites, cryo space travel between systems, plasma lances and stun guns etc. But the culture is more medieval with knights in armour, palace and family intrigue, political maneuvering, the Roman coliseum with fights to the death, a serf underclass, and over it all is the Chancery, the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition with it's powerful torturers and mystics. And Hadrian is well educated so there are quotes from Shakespeare, Thomas Aquinas and other ancients peppered into his thinking.
Book 3 of The Sun Easter series.
Ruocchio continues with the hard hitting tale of Hadrian Marlowe. In Book 2 Hadrian was spoken to by some mystical being and given insight into what he'd been called to. Then he was hijacked to the Emperor's court.
In Book 3 he goes looking for the higher ones behind that previous prophetic voice but leaving the city of empire is not as straightforward as he hoped. When at last he's able to continue with his search it's under the pressure of a looming war with the enemies of people everywhere. The book closes with another revelation that Hadrian is more than he knows.
Ruocchio has total mastery of his craft in this series. His prose is tight and engaging, even as his vocabulary is enough to bedazzle the reader. It would be good to have an author's lexicon sitting beside you for this work. I read ebooks and it's not easy to swap between the text and the lexicography at the end of the book to check stuff on the fly. For the rest of the series I'm considering printing out the end notes to have as a reference as I read.