Ancillary Sword

After the huge revelations of the first book, this is a very quiet, tame book by comparison. The plot moves directly on from the first book, with Breq being given her own starship and sent to a star system in an obscure corner of the Radch empire. However, the lack of epic empire-wide action gives the characters room to breath, and lets the author delve more deeply into the rich culture established in the first novel, the iniquities of an imperialist society, and the nature of personhood and individuality. So while not anywhere near as exciting as Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword is well worth a read.

Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice is a fascinating science fiction novel. It's better than most with regard to an exciting plot and well-constructed technologies, but where it shines is in its characterisation and its portrayal of a far-future culture similar and yet very different from our own. It is told from the viewpoint of Breq, a person on a quest to revenge herself against a vastly more powerful enemy. The compelling thing about the novel is the way the culture she is embedded in keeps surfacing, and has real effects on her actions and the actions of people around her. The culture is some sort of cross between ancient Roman militarism and sense of overarching justice; communism; and some eastern religions, complete with its own taboos, beliefs, rituals, and so forth, and like any real culture, is the framework within which all the actions of the characters take place. It is real and tangible throughout the novel. One of the first things most people comment about is lack of gender in the language, meaning that throughout the novel, except when the characters are talking in a different language, all the pronouns are rendered in english as female - so Breq is a "she" throughout, and it is never actually made clear what her actual gender is, because in the Radchaai culture, it isn't important. It's very well done, consistently handled, and leaves a native english speaker constantly wondering what the actual gender of each person is. The other main theme of the novel is the question of personhood and the self, and what constitutes each. The are persons in the novel who have multiple bodies, and this is critical to the plot as it unfolds, and clearly the author has put a lot of thought into what it is like to be a person with multiple bodies.

This is an excellent start to the Imperial Radch series, and well worth a read.

2312

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 is a solar-system wide political drama set (unsurprisingly) in the year 2312, after humankind has colonised most of the inner solar system, with a terraformed Mars and Venus and Titan in various phases of being terraformed. The protagonist is over 100 years old, somewhere in between female and male, and is from Mercury, and over the course of the story she comes to realize who she is and what she wants and deals with her inner demons while being a key player in effecting huge political changes to the solar system's political order. If you've read any of Robinson's other work, you'd agree that's a pretty normal kind of plot line. It feels like it is a sequel to the Mars trilogy, but that's not made explicit and apparently Robinson says that they are different timelines. But there's nothing in the book that makes that explicit, so you can quite happily read it as a continuation of Mars, set 120 years after the end of that trilogy.

For a novel that contains so many committee meetings, 2312 is a very rewarding book. It reflects on a lot of the issues facing us today (on Earth, the sea levels did end up rising 9 metres, there were mass extinctions, and the planet is still beset by chaos and occasional fighting), and possible solutions to those problems. It's well worth a read just for the bird's eye view of today's problems, but some of the potential solutions, and a sense of a potential future for humanity throughout the Solar system is fascinating. And it's written from a much personal viewpoint than the Mars trilogy, so it's a much more readable and relatable book than the Mars books were.

The Martian

I was considering seeing the movie, so thought it made sense to read the book. It was recommended to me several months back as well by Anna, who thought it would be right up my alley. She was right.

Andy Weir's The Martian isn't like any novel I've read before. It is written as the journal of Mark Watney, and astronaut stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew evacuate in a storm. And it really reads like the journal of an engineer stuck on Mars. It's long on detail on the endless number of things that Watney has to fix, and the specific technical problems that he is solving. It contains a great amount of complaining about boredom and the limited amount of entertainment available. And it doesn't delve deep into the emotional troubles of a man stranded alone on another planet for years. I work in software engineering, and it feels exactly like what myself or a colleague might write in this situation.

And for a novel which is almost entirely about technical troubleshooting, it's really edge-of-your-seat suspense. Whenever things start to stabilize and things seem safe, something catastrophic inevitably happens. I spent an entire miserable sickly day reading this, and managed to finish it within two days, which is something I rarely do.

Well worth a read if you've ever done any technical troubleshooting, or if you want to get a sense of what it's like to do so.

Lock In

I'm not normally a fan of cop stories, but John Scalzi can make any genre into an entertaining read. Lock In is set in the near future after a virus has rendered left numbers of people locked in - conscious, but unable to move in any way. Society's response was to develop brain scanning technology, and let the locked in people live in virtual worlds or control androids. 20 or so years later, locked-in Chris Shane is a detective trying to solve a weird murder that has big implications for people like himself.

It's a good mystery, and an entertainingly nefarious plot is uncovered through the course of the novel. Well worth a read, like the bulk of Scalzi's oeuvre.

Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses

I tend to avoid reading much about British history - firstly because it's a very small part of the world that only really became relevant in the last few hundred years, and secondly because there are plenty of people out there who already know it. The world doesn't need yet another person who can name all the Plantagenets but has no idea who the Sassanids were. But "The Wars of the Roses" is a very cool name for a series of civil wars, so I thought I'd give it a go (there was a bit of influence from a well-known Wars of the Roses fanfic that I've enjoyed reading).

It's hard to make history really interesting, but Alison Weir's Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses makes a good effort. It's well researched and notes the primary sources frequently without being overly footnotish. She makes good attempts to get inside the heads of the main protagonists - you end up with a good sense of who Margaret of Anjou, and Warwick were, not just what they did. Edward IV and Henry VI are less well-rounded, but Kings tend to be that way. The book starts out rather dry but picks up steam as it gets going - the first half took ages to read, but the second half I got through quite quickly.

But the actual wars themselves were rather pointless and depressing. There's no sense of a great historical change happening here. It's just cousins thumping each other with armies and playing Musical Thrones. Henry VI was a bit of a gumby and probably should have abdicated much earlier in favour of someone competent. Edward was a bit of a tool, bit at least he was competent. Warwick and Margaret might've made good rulers, but Warwick wasn't in line for the throne and so had to scheme and plot and switch sides all the time, and Margaret was a woman, and so had to rely on her gumby of a husband for legitimacy. And then at the end, the whole thing was rendered completely pointless by Richard (he of the Princes in the Tower) who ruined everything.

Hav

Hav, a compilation of Jan Morris' books Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons, is a strange beast. It reads like a travel memoir, but tell the tale of the author's visit to Hav, a fictional city-state adjoining Turkey. It's quite elegantly done: Jan Morris weaves her city into the history of the Mediterranean world, and into the lives of a variety of real-world historical figures who visited at one point or another. I'm not generally a fan of travel literature, so it was tough going at first, but the book gradually drew me in. I've said of various fantasy and sci-fi authors that they would have been better not attempting to tell a story, but just doing their worldbuilding - there are quite a few authors who create a fascinating world but make boring things happen in them. Jan Morris has done almost exactly that, creating a small geographical and historical fiction without burdening it with a plot or detailed characters. Not the most amazing thing I've read, but certainly a novel approach and an interesting read.