Old Man's War

I'm not normally a fan of Mil-SF, but John Scalzi's Old Man's War was very well written, and a very thoughtful look at interstellar, inter-species war. It owes a lot to Starship Troopers and other sci-fi, but with a more modern take on the technologies that will be available to the troops of the fascist interstellar governments of the future. The core of the novel is very much the personal journey of the main character, John Perry, from aging man on earth to space soldier defending Earth and its colonies from a range of alien species. Very much worth reading, and I'll be reading the sequels.

Jagannath

Karen Tidbeck's Jagannath was the second book of the five I bought in a Weird Fiction bundle from storybundle.com. It was also sad and lonesome and strange and magical, and tells stories of a reality quite unlike our own. A man who falls in love with an airship; a woman dealing with the death of her father and the strange disappearance of her mother many years earlier; a the people of strange holiday village in the wilderness of Sweden are some of the short stories in this collection. It is very Scandinavian, and it full of mythical creatures from folklore. It reminded me in some ways of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short stories - the underlying desolation covered by a magical weirdness that permeates the world. Well worth a read.

The Apocalypse Codex

The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth novel in the Laundry series, Charles Stross' delightful exploration of a world in which secret spy organizations battle eldritch Lovecraftian horrors. Bob Howard, the IT professional who was forcibly recruited into the British government's secret organization dedicated to fighting the coming apocalyptic end of the world, is pitted against an American evangelical preacher who it trying to bring about the second coming of Christ. As with the rest of the Laundry Files series, it's a rollicking good read, with lots of exciting action, sufficiently monstrous aliens gods and villainous plots to destroy the world, and an ongoing sense of profound nerdiness. Lots of fun, and well worth a read - particularly if you know how computers work and have a decent level of familiarity with the Cthulhu mythos.

Tainaron

I picked up Tainaron as part of a "weird fiction" ebook sale, not having heard of it before. By Finnish author Leena Krohn, it is written as a series of letters from an unnamed person staying in the city of Tainaron. Tainaron is a city populated by insects, and it is implied that the writer is human. The letters are to a lover or friend back in the writer's home city, and a lot is left unexplained. It's a fascinating novel, and hard to understand exactly what is going on, as a lot of things are hinted at or implied. It's never made clear exactly what the writer is doing in Tainaron - why they're there, or how long they plan to be there. The letters are soaked in the melancholy of homesickness and the strangeness of living in a foreign city, made more explicit by the nonhuman nature of the city's inhabitants.

Heart of Darkness

I can't say much about this that hasn't been said in a million high school book reviews over the years, but it was a weird read. Not much happens, the characters are all unlikable, and there's all kinds of unreliable narrating going on, but the main thing going for Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the ethereal, lyrical prose that creates a sense of dreamy otherworldiness. For such a short book, it took an awfully long time to read, due to the density of language it uses.

Mission of Gravity

I rarely delve into older science fiction, and I'm often rather unimpressed when I do - while there are often some interesting ideas in there, the characters and plots tend towards the flakey and unbelievable (well, more so than modern scifi). Mission of Gravity, written by Hal Clements in 1954, was a refreshing change. It deals with some interesting ideas (mostly, aliens that are basically intelligent centipedes, and a planet with huge gravity that is rotating very quickly which has lots of interesting physical effects), but the characters are also quite reasonable and not ridiculous. The plot wanders a bit (it was written to be serialised in magazines, so it's rather episodic), but retains a vague overall arc and comes together surprisingly well at the end. Overall, it was quite an enjoyable read, even though parts of it read a bit like a high school science lesson.

Rapture of the Nerds

I'm starting to get the feeling the Singularity subgenre only really has one good book in it. It's an amazing and powerful idea, but most of the novels based around the idea simply don't do it justice. That's partly because the actual implementation of the singularity would be incomprehensible for us mere humans, but I don't know whether than is really a good enough explanation for the silliness that these books tend towards.

Stross & Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds has a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but in lots of ways those are rehashed from previous books in the genre. The characters are the usual wild and wacky types you get in a singularity novel, battering up against forces for more powerful than themselves and fighting to retain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly digital world. But the plot of the novel tended towards the deus ex machina and the Chosen One trope, so it was quite unsatisfying and occasionally annoying.

The Difference Engine

I wasn't as impressed as I had expected to be by the Difference Engine - it's certainly an interesting idea, and full of clever ideas; and it's pretty much the origin of the whole Steampunk movement. But as a story it was a meandering collage of happenings across a collection of not-very-engaging characters.

It's an alternative history in which Charles Babbage successfully built his Difference Engine and went on to build an Analytical Engine, creating a world in which steam powered computers were functional and becoming widely used. Many other fancies of the steam age also came to pass - fast steam cars and the like. Britain's hereditary nobility were then overthrown by Babbage and Lord Byron, who instituted a new regime in which the Radical Lords ran the country. It's a very interesting alternative world, and it's no wonder that the Steampunk genre has so adherents.

As a novel, though, it left a lot to be desired, and the central conceit (only revealed right at the end) is vague and confusing, and leaves the reader wonder what the hell it was all really about.

Dangerous Women

This was a fun read - an anthology of fiction, mostly Fantasy, but some crime and historical fiction, all related to the topic of Dangerous Women. Some of it was fantastic, some terrible (note to self: never read any of the Dresden Files novels). Some stories were entirely populated by ass-kicking women; some were men dealing with the consequences of women being dangerous. Wikipedia has a good list of the stories contained.

I bought it mainly for George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire short story, "The Princess and the Queen, or, the Blacks and the Greens" - about the Dance of the Dragons, a civil war fought in Westeros 200 years before A Game of Thrones. It was good, if a bit dry and history-textbookish. But many of the other stories are fantastic, and well worth the read.

Being Alive

Tim Ingold's Being Alive was a thought-provoking yet frustrating read. Ingold is an anthropologist, and the book is an attack on the way anthropologists approach their subject, and in a larger sense, on how westerners think, and interact with the world. It's extremely low-level, challenging the reader on how they think about objects and motion and walking. Most of a chapter is spent discussing the action of sawing a piece of wood, and what that means.

Fundamentally, he argues that we think about the world around us as being comprised of objects. We mentally model the world as being a collection of "things" that have "properties", and have relationships. It's a world that can be represented as a set of connected points. He then argues in many ways and from many points of view, that we should be thinking of ourselves as lines (or bundles of lines) rather than as points, and that the lines interact with each other in many ways. He refers to a number of cultures that think about the world like this, and explains how our western way of thinking about the world blinds us to a real understanding of how these cultures work. Animism, the beliefs of many hunter-gatherer societies around the world, is in this picture not a world view where everything is imbued with a spirit, but is rather a world view where animals, people, rocks, and everything in the world are parts of stories, and there is no rigid separation between "living things" and "non-living things". That distinction isn't needed because they don't see the world as being comprised of objects, and so they don't need to imbue certain objects with the property of "living" in order to explain their ability to act in the world.

I don't think I've read anything that is quite such a fundamental attack on the way the western world  thinks, and it left me intellectually reeling in a number of places. I hadn't even considered the possibility of not thinking of the world in this way.

On the other hand, there is a lot about the book that frustrated me. There were an awful lot of straw men used to support his arguments - stating that people generally think of things in a certain way, which was clearly (to me) a blatant simplification of how actual people think. Plenty of unsupported arguments. And the most fundamental problem was that he never really explained what his alternative world-view was. He explained some of the properties of this world view, but never what the "lines" really actually represented - what they meant. So while I often agreed with his position that there are other ways of thinking about the world, I couldn't bring myself to embrace his position, because it wasn't ever stated. And lastly, as a mathematician by training, I found his statements about things "not being points, but rather, being lines" seemed rather trivial - there are plenty of things that can be represented as lines or points depending on how you want to view them - it's a simple transformation, not a fundamentally different thing.

I think Being Alive will give different things to different people. I can understand how it would appeal to humanities folks much more than it did to me. In many ways, the most important thing it contains is the questions it asks - many of which I've never heard asked before - rather than the answers it attempts to give.