Monthly Archives: July 2013

My review of “Throne of the Crescent Moon” by Saladin Ahmed is here.

My review of “2312” by Kim Stanley Robinson is here.

My review of “Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas” by John Scalzi is here.

I want to make a couple of quick notes about the other two novels nominated for the 2013 Hugo Awards.

The other two novels nominated are “Blackout” by Mira Grant (Orbit) and “Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance” by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen). I have not read either one yet, primarily because they’re both part of a series of books and I haven’t yet read any of the preceding novels either.

“Blackout” is the third book in the Newflesh Trilogy, an urban horror story about the world after the zombie apocalypse and the replacement of the traditional news media with social media on steroids. I have started reading “Feed” (on a trip a paperback copy was in my backpack as my non-electronic reading) and it grabbed my attention hard. But time constraints have prevented me from getting back to it yet and on to “Deadline” and “Blackout”. Sorry, Seanan!

“Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance” is apparently Book Fourteen of the Vorkosigan Saga. I have not read any of the previous thirteen books, but I know many friends in fandom who are huge fans of the series and of Ms. Bujold. The fact that Ms. Bujold has won six Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards is a testament to the quality of her writing.

The awards ceremony will be September 1st at LoneStarCon 3. (Final nag, if you want to vote, you can do so online, you have to be an attending or supporting member of the con, and the deadline is on Wednesday, July 31st, at 11:59 PM Central Time.)

Last year, Worldcon in Chicago tried to live stream the Hugo Awards (with John Scalzi as Master of Ceremonies), but the program got cut off by an errant DRM-bot after clips from the Best Theatrical Presentations were shown. LoneStarCon will live stream the ceremony again this year, hopefully with better advance communications with UStream and their bots.

The clock continues to tick if you’re planning on voting for this year’s Hugo Awards. The clock runs out at 11:59 PM Central (Texas) time in two days, Wednesday, July 31st. You can vote online, but you need to be an attending or supporting member of LoneStarCon 3 in order to vote.

As is my wont around this time of year I’ve been trying to read all of the nominated novels. My review of “Throne of the Crescent Moon” by Saladin Ahmed is here, and yesterday I reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312”. Today I’ll review John Scalzi’s “Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas” (Tor Books). (As always, I’ll try to avoid any major spoilers for those of you who haven’t read it yet.)

Just so we all know where we stand, full disclosure and all, I’ll make it clear here for those who don’t already know – I am a huge fan of John Scalzi and his writing. I discovered his “Old Man’s War” series a few years back and it’s one of my all-time favorite SF series (and I’ve read a lot of SF and fantasy.) I’ve started reading his other books and I haven’t been disappointed yet. I’ve met him at conventions and book signings.

I discovered his “Whatever” blog about two years ago. Mr. Scalzi’s writing on “Whatever” is one of the key factors behind my decision to start this blog. He takes on some tough subjects there and has a voice as clear, reasonable, and sane as anyone else I see these days, except possibly Paul Krugman. I highly recommend you read “Whatever”.

“Redshirts” (I’ll refer to it by the shorter title) is a standalone novel, not related to any of Mr. Scalzi’s other works.

It is in many respects a comedy, although there are aspects of it that will sneak up on you and possibly leave you in tears. This is a quality that I have often found in the best entertainment (think television shows such as “M*A*S*H” or today’s “Modern Family”) and seeing the same range of emotions brought out in an SF novel is a wonderful experience.

The book’s title and basic premise come from a central meme of Star Trek, particularly the original series from the 60’s. If an away team beams down to an alien planet facing belligerent aliens and a hostile environment, danger all around, phasers set to stun, you’ll always see Kirk in a gold shirt, Spock and another senior officer in blue shirts, and some nameless security dude in a red shirt. Guess who gets eaten by the bug-eyed monster?

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union flagship Intrepid. It’s a sweet assignment and he quickly makes friends with a handful of other junior officers who are transferring onto the Intrepid. But they all soon find out that things are odd on board.

Dahl’s in Xenobiology and his lab mates seem to almost magically disappear just before senior officers appear in the lab. Dahl’s new friends all notice that everyone on board is almost obsessed with away teams – and how to avoid them. As they start to put the pieces together, they realize that being picked to go on an away mission is not the dream job they believed it would be when they were at the Academy. As the lowest ranking member of the away team, their life expectancy will be very low.

It quickly also becomes apparent that everyone else already on board has also figured this out. At least, everyone except for the senior officers. But while the existing crew has found coping mechanisms to avoid being picked for an away team, Dahl and his friends decide to try and find out what the hell’s going on and how to change it.

The story grabs you and sucks you in quickly. Since we’re starting with a good chunk of story framework that we’re already familiar with, it doesn’t take long to get our bearings. And then Scalzi starts changing it up and messing around with the characters and the readers. “Meta” is a term I’ve seen used often in describing “Redshirts” and it’s quite appropriate.

But “Redshirts” is much more than meta. It’s very clever in showing us how the various pieces of the puzzle are discovered, how the various threads tie together, and how the problem is ultimately resolved. Scalzi’s style is breezy, witty, and funny. You’ll quickly get quite attached to our plucky protagonists as they try to save their asses and solve the mystery of their existence.

The “novel” portion of “Redshirts” is short for a novel and it’s a quick, fun read. Following that are the three “codas”, smaller stories that are tangential to the main novel, but not a part of it. They each give us a much deeper look into what happens next to one of the relatively minor characters from the “novel” section. And if you’re anything like me, they’ll break your heart.

After 231 pages of snappy repartee, quick comebacks, and raucous adventures, the three codas smacked me right in the feels. It was a very, very good thing.

I most highly recommend you get a copy of “Redshirts” and relish it. I suspect it may be a book you’ll read over and over. When you’re at that next party and someone asks if you’ve read anything good lately, you’ll have an answer.

If I were voting for this year’s Hugo Awards Best Novel, it would probably be a toss-up for me between “2312” and “Redshirts”. In my mind it’s a choice analogous to the Academy Award voting for Best Movie, where the film that was the “deepest” and most “serious” almost always wins over the terribly entertaining movie that made $500M, sold a zillion tickets, and had people seeing it three or four times.

“2312” was deep and serious, but “Redshirts” would have to win my Hugo vote simply because it was just so much fun to read.

First of all, a reminder to any and all of my fannish friends, the deadline for voting for this year’s Hugo Awards is in three days, on July 31st. You need to be an attending or supporting member of LoneStarCon 3 in order to vote. It is highly unlikely that I will be able to attend Worldcon this year, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying to read as many of the nominated stories as possible.

A few weeks ago I wrote about “Throne of the Crescent Moon” by Saladin Ahmed. Today I would like to share with you what I thought after reading “2312” by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit Books). (I’ll try to avoid any major spoilers for those of you who haven’t read it yet.)

“2312” follows a series of events across the solar system in a near future which sees mankind divided. On the one hand, Earth is a swollen, rotting cesspit dealing with a population of eleven billion, pollution, and the consequences of climate change. On the other hand, spacers have spread across the solar system to build cities and outposts in almost every possible place, even (or especially) in places that we as readers in the present day wouldn’t believe possible.

The story starts with Swan Er Hong, an artist and free-thinker who we learned has previously been a designer of customized habitats. She lives on Mercury in the planet’s single great city of Terminator. The city constantly travels around the planet on tracks to keep it on the dark side of Mercury, since the heat and radiation from the sun would be extremely lethal.

When Swan’s grandmother Alex dies, Swan is introduced to Jean Genette, a detective from the asteroid settlements. Genette is a “small”, a member of a human subspecies modified to be about half the size of average humans. He indicates that Alex’s death may not have been natural and that Alex had been working with a number of other leaders and leading scientists across the solar system on some very secret project.

Swan then is introduced to Fitz Wahram, a diplomat and leader from Titan. Wahram is a very large man from Titan, his human subspecies having been modified with frog-like genes. Neither Wharam nor Genette will talk about what they and Alex were supposedly involved with, but they both believe that Alex would have left some sort of message or information with Swan.

What follows is a combination of detective mystery, spy thriller, and travelogue. We quickly see that there are indeed malevolent forces at work, but the who, what, how, and why need to be puzzled out.

In the process we get a peek into almost every corner of this bustling solar system. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, Saturn itself, Saturn’s rings, multiple asteroids and transport vehicles created out of asteroids – all are shown to us in some considerable detail as the story progresses.

The story is told in a unique and interesting fashion, with chapters of third-person narrative (each chapter following one main character or another) interspersed with chapters of “Lists”, “Extracts”, and (in the second half of the book) “Quantum Walks”.

Each of these short chapters (just a couple of pages each) is a different way of giving us information about what is going on in the story. Instead of exposition, we get some no-so-random raw data to start fermenting in our memory. We’re on our own to figure out what it might have to do with the story. It’s a really good way of involving our brain and getting us a head start on what’s coming up.

“Lists” are just what they sound like. For example, “Lists (9)” is two pages of space propulsion systems.

“Extracts” are collections of paragraph-length bits of data on some subject or theme. Each bit starts and stops in mid sentence, like newspaper or magazine clippings cut out at random. Nonetheless, I found it quite effective at getting my thought process primed with new information.

“Quantum Walks” are stream of consciousness exercises from a computer.

As with Robinson’s earlier “Mars Trilogy”, I really enjoyed the detail in which he showed both the technical wonders of this universe and the economic and political realities that went along with it. We get to follow Swan and friends around and be sightseers through the entire solar system. We also get deep into the nitty-gritty of how this messy political and economic balance is maintained.

Earth is deeply dependent on the energy, food, and resources being shipped down from the space colonies. The colonies are still dependent on Earth both for its diverse (if damaged) biosphere and for the effect its gravity has on human longevity. Yet both factions are jealous and distrustful of each other. The average human on Earth is poverty stricken and downtrodden, yearning to leave for the colonies. The average human in the colonies is very well aware of just how dangerous the various space environments are and how fragile their existence is.

While I enjoyed cruising around the solar system and seeing the wondrous sights, I was less satisfied with the thriller and mystery aspects of the story. The plot thickens and various violent events occur, but in the end I had uneasy feelings that there were several important loose ends. For example, we never do get any idea of Alex’s death was natural or a homicide. (I can’t discuss my other unanswered questions further without major spoilers, so if you want to discuss further, please contact me by e-mail.)

Finally, there was one long narrative chapter in the middle of the book that was key for developing the long-term relationship between Swan and Wahram, but I found it to drag on interminably. I thought that the same portion of the story could have been told in half as many pages. That one chapter almost derailed the entire book for me.

If you’ve read Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy” you will recognize his style and it is very tempting to think that “2312” is set in the same universe, just in a slightly different setting and time. I know that for the longest time while reading, I kept looking for points where the two story lines intersected. But while similar, this is not the universe of the “Mars Trilogy”. Same planets, similar time frame, similar tech, similar societies, but different story, characters, and universe.

Robinson’s web site says that “2312” is a standalone novel and not the first novel of a trilogy. That may well be true, and the book does stand on its own, but I can’t help but wonder if some of what I perceived as loose ends weren’t actually plot points to be explored further in another book. But that’s just speculation on my part, possibly brought about by my discomfort with the unanswered questions.

I was really looking forward to reading “2312” and despite the couple of nits that I picked, I was not disappointed. “2312” won this year’s Best Novel Nebula Award in May and it might very well win this year’s Hugo Award in the category next month.

If I were voting, it would probably be a toss-up for me between “2312” and…