Emphyrio

I've like Jack Vance's weird blend of fantasy and science fiction since I was a teenager. He presents cultures and worlds with this air of stagnation and byzantine flamboyance that is unlike any othe writer. Emphyrio is a perfect example of this - it's a science fiction, but set in a strictly controlled medieval world where every person is required to follow their parents' career path, and respect the strict control of the Welfare Agency. As such, it feels more like fantasy than science fiction, probably deliberately so.

The protagonist, Ghyl Tarvoke, is a carver who dreams of great things - mainly, freedom and financial independence, and he stands up to the Lords and Ladies of his world to fight for it, with a range of unexpected consequences. As the story unfolds, it turns into a space opera, with Ghyl uncovering the mysteries of his home world. It's an interesting take on a possible future, emphasizing the diversity of governments and societies that are likely to evolve is we ever manage to get off Earth and spread ourselves across the galaxy.

Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons is hauntingly beautiful and heart-rending to read. Set in a South American town in the 18th century, it tells the story of the life and death of Sierva Maria, the daughter of a noble whose life has fallen apart around him. She is bitten by a rabid dog, and the emotional disturbances caused by her neglected upbringing are diagnosed as rabies, and then as demonic possession. The tale leads inexorably to a tragic ending for all involved.

I love reading the works of Gabriel García Márquez - they are incredibly powerful - haunting and sad and tragic and subtly surreal, and at the end you're left with echoes of melancholy rather than ideas and plot. They need to be taken in small doses, as too much can overwhelm, so I only delve into his corpus every few years. They colour my whole mental picture of South America - I haven't read much other literature from south of the US/Mexican border, so when I think of South America, I think of sadness and lost love, of careful, gentle priests and dreaming girls, of magic and melancholy. It's a beautiful world, one I can ever visit because it only exists in García Márquez's pages.

Neptune's Brood

I've been a big fan of Charles Stross since I first read Accelerando years ago. I got my hands on this one the day it was released (ebooks ship quickly) - it's a followup to Saturn's Children, set some number of thousands of years into the future, in a posthuman universe that is being gradually colonized by the successors of Humanity.

More than any Sci-Fi author I've read, Stross is fascinated by economics. This thread in his fiction seems to be becoming stronger over the years, though it has always been there, and played an important part in Accelerando. In Neptune's Brood, the protagonist is a banker - specifically, a historian of accounting practices. The gradual colonization of space is drive by economics, not by any sense of manifest destiny or adventurous spirit or greater good of humanity. The novel is, in the end, a accountancy detective thriller set in the far future, rather than a classic space opera. Stross throws in a lot of ideas about how interstellar colonization will work in a universe governed strictly be the speed of light and laws of physics as we know them, and a few of them are quite fascinating. A few of them seem to be of more interest to Stross than to this reader, though.

I wasn't left as impressed with Neptune's Brood as I was by Saturn's Children or Accelerando, but it was still a worthwhile read.

Blue Mars

The last in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Blue Mars kind of wraps up the story that unfolded in the two previous books. By "kind of", it does it in a slow, meandering kind of way. The book is trying to be a history of the settling and terraforming of Mars, as seen through the eyes of the first humans on Mars, and it really feels that way. There's a whole lot in all three books that is unnecessary. Like real history, deaths can be quite abrupt and not really have a good reason; a lot happens that isn't important, or related to any big thread of history, but is documented in any case. These books could have been a lot shorter, without losing a lot of their substance. But their bulk, and focus on the characters, meant that a huge big pile of ideas could be comfortably slipped in. Robinson has clearly thought a whole lot about how humans will colonize the Solar System; and in bringing together a lot of ideas that people have come up with over the last century, alongside quite a few of his own, he seems to have set the standard for describing how this will happen - a lot of what I read in this series reminded me very much of Charles Stross' Saturn's Children (written later, and has many ideas for how each planet will be settled directly taken from the Mars series, as far as I can see). Of course, the way Robinson writes the Mars trilogy has a certain "rightness" to it - coming out the end of these three long books, I really feel that if we're going to colonize the Solar System, this is exactly how we'll do it.

All in all, it's a very impressive series, and I'm glad I read it. If I had my time again, though, I would strongly consider reading the Cliff's Notes version, to get to the good stuff a lot quicker.

Postsingular

I possibly came into this one with overly high hopes. Rudy Rucker is often mentioned as one of the key authors writing about the Singularity, a concept I find endlessly fascinating. I think I was kind of expecting another Accelerando, but this wasn't up to that level.

Postsingular tells the tale of a few folks who live through a very simplistic Singularity, and how they cope with the new always-networked world populated by artificial intelligences and strange beings from a parallel universe (specifically, another brane different from, but very close to our universe). Some of the ideas are really very interesting, but it's all very deus ex machina, and reads more like a cheap fantasy novel (our heroes go to a magical land to bring back a magical artifact to save the world from a villain who wants to destroy it and remake it to bring back his lost love). Many parts of it were very cartoonish, and it suffered from one of my least favourite tropes, the Amazing Author Whose Creativity Can Change The World.

So overall, I was a bit disappointed. I think I'll start looking at Vinge to get my Singularity hit, and keep hoping Charlie Stross will jump back on that horse.

Green Mars

Green Mars, the second novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, is more of the same. It follows a reasonably large group of settlers and Martian natives (humans, born and raised on Mars) over a number of decades. It's pretty slow going, and not a lot happens. After the huge, disastrous, failed revolution, this book is mostly leading up to a second revolution, to free Mars from Earth and its greedy megacorporations.

It feels like about half the book could have been comfortably removed, without reducing the book's impact, or the overall plotline. It feels like the story is meant to be about the big picture of Martian colonization, terraforming, and politics as seen by its early settlers, but there is just a bit too much detail about the personal lives of a group of not particularly likeable, not particularly interesting characters. I don't feel like I'm getting to know them any better, or that their personal travails are adding a lot to the story, so a lot of this could be cut down, an you'd still have the big picture as well as the people picture.

That said, the tale of making Mars a world habitable by humans is unfolding rather majestically. Robinson really knows his stuff, and goes into quite an amount of technical detail describing how the atmosphere is being remade, how oceans are being created, how plant life is being seeded across the planet, and how human society is being rebuilt to adapt to this new world and the new technologies that have been developed. It's fascinating, and the series is well worth the read for this alone. It really feels like a a realistic portrayal of how the settlement of Mars might unfold.

Red Mars

The first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is turning out to be an interesting read. I read the Years of Rice and Salt a few years ago and was blown away by how good it was, but I wasn't sure what to expect with this one. It's clearly the work of someone fascinated by Mars, who loves the planet and the potential for a new society it brings - and this is both a good and a bad thing.

Written in the 1990s, it's extremely up-to-date on our knowledge of Mars, though there is a fair bit of fictional science in there. The downside to Red Mars is that it's a book that really just wants to explore ideas - it's pretty clear that if Robinson could have made a living just writing a giant wiki about Mars and potential societies that might evolve there, he would have been happier doing that than having to saddle his ideas with characters and a plot. Most characters seem to be archetypes, placeholders for an idea rather than real people. There is an awful lot of infodumping happening - I know quite a bit more about the geology of Mars than I did six weeks ago (unfortunately, I don't know how much is based on real world observation and how much is Robinson's wishful thinking). The space elevator bits were fascinating.

I did enjoy Red Mars, and I'm now reading book 2 of the trilogy; but it feels like a series that many folks who are less science-nerdy than myself might not get a lot out of.