Roadside Picnic

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic is a bit of an odd book - it seems to be trying to make a point, but I couldn't quite work out what that point was. It is set in an abstract time period, probably the near future of the 1960s, after aliens had landed on earth in four locations, dropped a pile of assorted stuff, and left. It's set in Canada, but it's a Canada with a very Russian feel to it - all heavy drinking and institutional oppression. Redrick Schuhart is a stalker - a person who makes a living sneaking into the Zone (where the aliens landed), and stealing their artifacts for sale. The Zone is a deadly place, full of random deadly items and occurrences, and most stalkers end up dead. Red is one of the veterans of the trade - he has been doing it a long time, and has strong survival instincts in the zone.

As the story unfolds, the reader finds out more about the nature of The Zone - what the various items are capable of doing, and the effect it has on people who venture inside. Red's deformed child, Monkey, is an example of these effects.

Roadside Picnic is an interesting meditation on the possible effects of contact with an alien civilization, one so advanced that we just have no understanding of how far ahead of us they are, and how their tech works. But it is also very much a product of its time and place, the strange and somewhat alien (to my eyes, now) world of the Cold War.

The Dog Stars

I do like a good post-apocalyptic story. I guess it comes from being an Australian - the landscape and weather lend themselves to thoughts of the absence of humanity, of the collapse of life as we know it. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is set in a post-collapse USA. In the Dog Stars, it is a series of diseases - a flu, and some mysterious blood-borne disease - that have wiped out nearly all people, and the survivors have descended into barbarism. In many ways, The Road and The Dog Stars could both be set in the same world; the way the world ended might be different, but the behaviour of the survibors is the same; although the characters in The Dog Stars seem to have been much more successful in setting themselves up for life after the apocalypse.

At the start of the novel, Hig and and Bangley are the only two remaining people in a small town in inland USA. They defend themselves from other survivors, who seem to turn up in the town every few months, trying to attack and kill them. The novel is somewhat unclear about the morality of all this - Hig seems ambivalent about whether they should be killing these attackers, or trying to befriend them. His few attempts at befriending have failed, nearly getting them killed, so now their reaction to newcomers is now to shoot on sight.

It's a slow story, with only a little action, but it's an exploration of Hig's loss, his sadness, and his search for hope in a ruined world. It comes to its conclusion well, and you get to know the characters well enough that their reactions to things can sometimes come as a bit of a surprise. The Dog Stars is well written (the switching between Hig's stilted day to day voice and his waxing poetical is very nicely done), and well worth reading.

The Quiet American

I've been meaning to read something by Graham Greene for a while, and this was the first novel of his I happened across. Written in 1956, it tells the story of the unfolding relationship between Fowler, a world-weary and cynical British reporter, and Pyle, a naive American sent across to represent US interests in Vietnam. Set against the backdrop of the French attempt to suppress the communist uprising. It is a vivid and complex story, and interestingly prescient regarding America's role in Vietnam in subsequent decades. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused" says Fowler of Pyle, and it serves as a verdict of American foreign policy - the foolishness and destructiveness of a new imperialist power, as few through the eyes of an old imperialist power.

The focal point of the clash between Fowler and Pyle is Phuong, Fowlerr's beautiful Vietnamese lover. Pyle falls for her as well, and proceeds to try to win her from Fowler. There is a simmering tension between the two men, which never threatens to erupt into violence, despite the raw emotions involved.

Morally ambiguous and complex, this makes a very interesting read - both as a novel and as historical commentary.

The Hydrogen Sonata

I'm always excited when a new Iain M. Banks book comes out, especially if it's a Culture novel. Even though the last one was a bit of a disappointment, I eagerly jumped onto the iBook store and downloaded this one the day it came out.

It's pretty good. The Hydrogen Sonata turns out the be a historical music composition that the protagonist of the story is trying to master. The piece of music itself isn't important, but the time period it's from, around the time the Culture was formed, is important. The composer was a Gzilt, a humanoid species that elected not to join the Culture. The plot of the story revolves around the last days of the Gzilt civilization, as they prepare to Sublime - in the Culture universe, civilizations, once they reach a technological peak, elect to exit our Universe, and move, as a whole, to another plane of existence. Subliming has been mentioned in a number of previous Culture novels, and it's interesting to see it explored in depth. It also delves a bit into the psychology of the Culture's Ships, hyper-intelligent AIs embedded in starships. It gets back to the sense of wonder at the vastness of it all that pervades some of Banks' earlier Culture novels.

It is a good read, and if you like sci-fi, it's a definite must-read (along with all the other Iain M Banks novels).

Rule 34

Charles Stross's Rule 34 is a sequel to Halting State. It's not my favourite series of Stross's, but it's still an interesting look into the near future. I think it's meant to be a bit mind blowing, but for a reader like myself, immersed in talk about the always-connected, metadata-enhanced world Stross is talking about, and actively trying (in a very small way) to bring it about, I had a whole lot of "yeah, I can see it panning out that way" and "that's unlikely because..." moments as I read the novel. There is a cop story in there as well, but the novel is really about the affects of these technologies on people's lives.

Well worth reading, especially if you're not an internet nerd like me, since it is good preparation.

The Remains of the Day

Mr Stevens is a butler, living and working in Darlington Hall, serving an American, Mr Farraday, who has recently bought the property. Before that, he served Lord Darlington for many years. This story is Stevens' reminiscences of his life as a butler, told as he takes a driving tour across the south of England to visit a former work colleague.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day is slow, beautiful, and haunting. It is told in the first person by Stevens, and is written as though Stevens is addressing a fellow butler. He ponders the nature of his duties as a butler, his professionalism, and what it is that makes a truly great butler. Stevens is always professional, almost robotic at times, and yet his humanity leaks through the corners of his story, and there is a real sadness to the way his life has unfolded. At the same time, there is much humour in his interactions with others - one thread of the story is his repeated failed attempts at humour, and trying to learn to "banter". It is set in the 1950s, and Stevens is a man struggling against the changing world, a world in which the rigid class hierarchies of pre-war England are falling apart. He felt much more at home serving Lord Darlington before the war, when Lords and servants knew their places. It's a fascinating glimpse into a very different world to our own.

This novel won the 1989 Booker prize, and continues the theme of Booker prize winners being sad stories of people whose lives have gone wrong. Is sadness intrinsically more powerful, more beautiful than happiness? I hope not, and yet I'm still waiting to read a Booker prize winner where people are happy.

Blindsight

Peter Watts' Blindsight was suggested to me by a friend at work, when I was waxing lyrical about Charles Stross's science fiction - he had similar opinions about Watts' work. And I have to agree that Blindsight is an extremely smart novel. In a lot of ways it is more a meditation on the nature of sentience and consciousness than it is a novel. It looks closelt at the latest neuroscience to try to examine what it is to be sentient - why it is we are self-aware, and what that means. It does this by involving the characters in first contact with an alien race - one of the more convincingly alien races I have read about.


It's less convincing as a story than it is as a vehicle for ideas. The characters are unlikeable and emotionally damaged in many ways. I got most of the way through the book before I could tell two of them apart - whenever they were mentioned, I had to stop to try and work out which of the two was being talked about. The descriptions of the various spacecraft were quite confusing as well - the geometry of the main spaceship, the Theseus, was frequently discussed throughout the book, as the characters moved through it, but I still couldn't picture it.

Even so, it's a worthwhile read. I don't think I've been pushed to think about these things quite so hard by any novel before. It's particularly interesting with respect to my studies - these issues are important to understanding the ways that people create knowledge - we have a lot of theories, but we still don't really understand how people learn. To understand how people learn is not only a neuroscientific issue; it is about what makes us who we are, and what the self is.