Reviews and Comments

It's rare that I'd give a perfect score to a space opera, but this novel is so inventive and well told that I had to give it the nod.

Vinge accomplished something with A Fire Upon The Deep that I feel like I've been searching for ever since I read the Iain M. Banks' first Culture novel (Consider Phlebas) - a galaxy that is lively, filled with truly alien aliens, obscenely high technology, and many disparate factions - but in a lot of ways Vinge succeeds where Banks' later Culture books fail.

In Vinge's universe, humanity is not only a small part of a huge tapestry of civilizations of all descriptions, it's also a fragile and vulnerable race. The loss of a single world, or a single ship actually hurts and the main characters of the novel are usually some of the only humans nearby. This is a refreshing change of pace from Banks' work where humanity is ensconced in the nearly all powerful and galaxy dominating Culture that is so far beyond the usual needs and wants of us lowly 21st century Earth humans that in Look to Windwarda literal God race had to be tailor made for the story to imbue a particularly depressed suicide bomber with a small chance to kill billions of humans on a Culture Orbital - all as a purely symbolic "fuck you" that would have accomplished nothing by making a point.

Vinge does a better job of conveying what is happening on a galactic level too. He takes a page out of the early internet's decentralization so his civilizations, businesses, and individuals all communicate on a BBS-style low bandwidth galactic Net. The reader follows along with characters receiving the news and the messages paint a good picture of what's happening and how the rest of the galaxy is reacting to events without needing extraneous scenes or characters. Transmission also requires line of sight and long distance requires many hops which, compared to the instantaneous and disembodied chatter of Banks' hyper-intelligent AI Minds, is wonderfully grounded. The mechanic is never overused either (which was one of my big complaints about Banks' Excession where pages were devoted to what amount to first person ship logs).

Even space itself has more character in A Fire Upon The Deep. Space is not one big homogenous grid we're hanging in. It has "zones" that characterize how fast energy and information can be transmitted. Closer to the galactic core, high tech things like AI automation, FTL, and data transmission begin to degrade - not because of a plot convenient accident ("oh no, the AI went haywire!") but naturally and predictably such that characters are aware of it and plan for it. I love this idea and it made me think differently about something most space fiction takes for granted - the void of space itself. The concept is so well applied it informs every aspect of the story (thus the name of the series Zones of Thought). Primitive core worlds are trapped but also protected by the reluctance of the more advanced, high worlds to even enter their space and those advanced worlds are in turn protected from the civilizations that have effectively transcended in a similar way.

Vinge's conception of alien races is also deeply satisfying. Alien cultures, particularly the ones A Fire Upon The Deep focuses on are weird. And not just in a "I have a bumpy forehead and an odd number of legs" or a "My cultural values are different" weird, but a "you can't even comprehend what my life is like" weird. The Tines and the Skroderiders both followed an evolutionary path that is utterly foreign and novel compared to any other fictional race. It's hard, but fun, to puzzle out just what life would be like if one was, say, six different dog creatures or member of a billion year old sentient tree race. Best of all, Vinge does a great job of making these alien cultures feel real and true to what makes them unique instead of just being humanity with a few extra appendages.

Lastly, I have to acknowledge how Vinge wrote this book as a completely self-contained story. The end of the book is conclusive and satisfying in a way that some fiction is lacking these days. There are follow up books, including a direct sequel that came out 20 years later, but at no point does it feel like plot hook are being laid to support the next entry. I appreciate the brevity in comparison to series like The Expanse or Mistborn whose entries were fun but still obviously written to be parts of a larger, overall work.

These points elevate A Fire Upon The Deep well above the average space opera and I wish I'd read it earlier.

I honestly couldn't finish this book. I'm trying not to be overly critical and to give it the benefit of the doubt considering its 40 years old and a translation to boot, but after getting 350 pages into it, I started to dread picking it up and to me that's a strong sign it's time to move on.

The actual core mystery plot, and even the two main characters, were interesting and fun to read about but the author spends so much time on the minutiae of 1300s Catholic politics that I had trouble staying focused. I almost nodded off more than once. In the end I had to skip paragraphs just to keep from drowning in the sea of text rife with untranslated Latin, tangential names and places and nuanced theological argument about tiny aspects of Christianity that only a monk would fret over.

The worst part is that I feel like I'm actually a softer audience for this book than most. I have a grasp on the history and Catholic theology (being ex- myself), I can appreciate a smattering of Latin, I can even find interest in the abuses pre-Reformation Catholicism and its heresies. The trouble is that none of this painstaking historical table setting really matters that much to the main story.

It's almost like reading two books - one an exciting story of a Holmes/Watson style duo investigating a medieval serial killer around a labyrinth of forbidden knowledge (almost in the vein of Dan Brown), the other a very dry log of a group of Biblical scholars arguing. In fact the only reason I read as much as I did was that the murder mystery part was just compelling enough to get me through the mind numbing parts that seem to switch on every other chapter.

Reading the synopsis online I'll admit I might be bailing right as it was starting to climax, but ultimately I couldn't bring myself to keep slogging through it to dig out a few gems when I've got other books to read.

This was a really interesting book in the Culture series even though it didn't really match the others in subject matter.

The premise of this book is fascinating and it let Banks completely escape the usual hyper-advanced Culture setting and spend some of his boundless imagination on a medieval or Renaissance level world with two Culture agents basically having a long distance philosophical argument.

The world was deep and well thought out in the Banksian way, having enough detail to really make it feel like a unique place while using a lot of Earth short hand for the stuff that doesn't matter (i.e. the world is still very similar to feudal Europe in terms of organization, kings, dukes, barons etc.). The top level plot ends up being a bit boilerplate, but that's because the reader is more interested in the world and individual characters than the political machinations of this backwards planet so I wouldn't necessarily call that a flaw (and is quite typical for the other Culture books).

I enjoyed reading this book a lot, but if I had to criticize one portion of it, it's that we never get the sort of curtain dropping chapter at the end where all of the reader's suspicions about these characters and their origins are confirmed. There are plenty of tantalizing clues about our Culture representatives and their history together told as a story within a story, there are several sly references where it's clear to readers of previous entries what's actually being talked about, but in the end it's entirely background. In a way that's more fun than just having a final chapter that's like "Hey, remember that time we lived on a medieval planet? That was nuts." but I still expected a bit more of a concrete connection to the Culture at the end of the book even if it was just a glimpse of the characters leaving the planet. I did appreciate that the author of the in-world text (Oelph) did spend some time summarizing what happened in his world after the Culture agents faded from view, so I guess that's fair compensation.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Culture series. I've been bouncing through the series based on interest and availability (my local bookstore has a big gap between Use of Weapons and Matter for some reason) but this story is much more in the vein of earlier Culture novels than the experimental Use of Weapons (in which the plot was overly confused by characters having multiple disconnected names in different time periods) or the abstract Excession (which focused too closely on floating conversations between AIs).

This story, similar to Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games, is able to use the Culture universe as a setting for a more conventional humanoid story. Which isn't to say that the story is unoriginal or straightforward, it's actually rather unpredictable and twisty, but it boils down to a much more relatable human level of "character I like is in danger" rather than being a more abstract, less tangible threat to be resolved and this is a perfect setup for Banks' writing.

Banks is at his best when delving into the minutiae of his world. Whether it's reasoning about how the vast megastructure Orbitals are created and maintained, or how the Culture deals with personal danger in a world full of safety nets and backups, or the inner workings of alien societies or even the bizarre mating habits of city sized alien creatures. Look to Windward has these details in droves and it's an absolute pleasure to read and imagine.

I read this because it's one of my dad's old books. He calls it his favorite, and is a Faulkner fan in general, but I gotta admit that I wouldn't have finished this if it wasn't for that connection.

There are passages of this book that are great. Long sequences of evocative imagery, especially with Christmas and the "street" of crime he follows from 17 to 33 and his various wanderings leading to Jefferson or his flight after the house burns down where he drifts for days unable to keep track of time.

Faulkner has a definite style of his own, the story reads like it's being told to you, with a lot of vernacular and contextual repetition of words and in that way it feels personal. Considering it was set in Faulkner's modern day and place, that makes sense - it's literally him telling you this story as if you were just sitting and listening.

Generally I love authors with a point of view. That said, Faulkner's style basically goes against everything that I value in prose. His sentences are long and winding and hard to parse. The story jumps back and forth in time, sometimes in order to fill in backstory, but sometimes it just feels like he was jumping ahead to touch on one character before the others and then later he fills in the gap. This does work some of the time (for example, knowing that Brown flees the cabin before you read the scene where he's in the cabin colors all of the lies he tells to Lena) but other times it's just confusing (like when we find out Christmas is shot to death before we read the passage about his "escape", even though we already knew he died). There are also more one-off characters than I care to remember (like how the final chapter is told as a first person recounting of a new character introduced for no real reason). Again, all of this mirrors the sort of long, winding oral history vibe that Faulkner was presenting, but just because that's the case doesn't make it any easier to read.

Anyway, it was these bipolar stretches of greatness connected with almost tediously windy prose that turned this book into more of a chore than I usually tolerate. By the time I was on the last 100 pages I was just reading to finish the book more than any enjoyment or interest in the story and, even if I can intellectually see where Faulkner was going and recognize that there are probably themes and symbols I'm failing to examine, in my mind that gut check is pretty damning.

I really enjoyed this book, even if it's a bit reminiscent of the familial epics I've been growing a bit tired of.

A 3.5 might be a bit more honest, because even though Steinbeck's writing is a pleasure, I think this story was bit indulgent. A lot of words were spent on very early history that was only mildly relevant, tangents out of Steinbeck's life (the novel is semi-autobiographical), and even though he is quite affectionate in his description of Salinas it's occasionally a bit much.

That said, for a novel that's pretty clearly a re-telling of the beginning of Genesis (I mean, look at the title) it had a lot of really great scenes, action, drama, and even a few chapters that were just plain funny. Even though it hits some of the bullet points from the Bible it wasn't predictable and the overall message - which was beautifully underscored by the ending - was quite different than the usual take away from the story of Cain and Abel.

Lots of really good side characters as well. Samuel Hamilton and Lee particularly being a couple of guys I'd like to sit down and have a drink of ng-ka-py with.

Once again Pratchett delights. It's funny, I always start Discworld books and in some sort of reflexive memory from the first few books that were much more straight parody, I think "Oh, I know exactly where this is going" and without fail I'm wrong.

This book is no different. Of course, Ankh-Morpork and the Watch are returning characters, and the setup for the story is very much like Guards! Guards! (someone wants to install a king, new watchmen) but at its core this book is a solid mystery plot that twists on you more than a few times.

Pratchett's charm, to me, is that reading him makes me feel like everyone has a place in this universe. Everyone has something to bring to the table. The Patrician believes all men are evil, and rules the city accordingly, but effectively. Carrot believes all men are good, and inspires those around him to be good. The dwarves and trolls of Ankh-Morpork are opposing, but only because each is unwilling to listen to the other. Vimes, Nobby, Colon, Angua, Cuddy are all flawed, in their own ways, but all manage to be assets to the Watch and thus the city. Even Gaspode the dog, a flea bitten stray has found his niche in life.

I also thought it was especially brilliant that Pratchett relates Trolls to computer processors because it sneakily fits with lore (trolls being rocks coming from high, cold mountains and evolved best there) but also means inherently Trolls aren't actually dumb... they're just different and running slow at "normal" temperatures for Men and Dwarves. Counting in powers of 2 was a nice touch, and yet another subtle nod Pratchett makes to real world advanced technology.

I also found it interesting the comparison Pratchett draws between traditional Discworld weapons (your typical fantasy fare) which draw on the person's own strength to work, versus the Gonne (the pivotal artifact of the book) which harnesses outside energy in the form of gunpowder (errr Powder #1) and requires you to trigger. You own a sword and put it to use, but the Gonne owns you, and uses you. The Gonne speaks to the user, but it is not actually magical... it speaks to you because of the ease with which it kills. The tempting voice is not some evil spirit, it's your own nature when given an easy way to eliminate your enemies.

I think that's a fascinating distinction to make and it made me think hard about how the shift from sword and arrow to gunpowder also coincided with the shift in how we humans view warfare, and how our leaders use warfare so quickly in the modern day.

Anyway, all of this is wrapped up in the usual comic wit Pratchett brings to his work. I appreciated touching base with a lot of the old favorite characters, and I was thoroughly pleased with the ending. I'm looking forward to the next in the Watch series of Discworld, or another glimpse at Ankh-Morpork with the new Watch.

Stephenson is one of my favorite sci-fi authors. I loved Snow Crash, Anathem, and Cryptonomicon. I had less of a taste for the Baroque Cycle books (although I've been meaning to give them a re-read), but The Diamond Age is easily my favorite of his novels so far.

If Snow Crash was Stephenson's breakthrough into hardcore science fiction, The Diamond Age is really a beautiful midpoint between it and Cryptonomicon. Where Snow Crash was imaginative and fun to read if relatively simple, and Cryptonomicon was brilliant despite being the beginning of his sometimes tediously verbose and tangent-prone stage, The Diamond Age is just the right balance of complexity, sweeping scope, mind-bending technology and interesting characters.

It's actually sort of shocking to me that this book was published in 1995. Stephenson's ideas about technology still feel fresh 23 years later. From the "matter compilers" being echoed (poorly) in modern 3D printers, to intensely distributed systems and heavy crypto that pre-date things like BitTorrent and Bitcoin, to even farther future ideas like the implications of designer nanotech that can carpet the world searching, or building, or killing, or defending. Stephenson also bravely looks at the next permutations of human organization and society. I was especially fascinated by the Drummers and their hivemind orgy of computation, as well as the Reformed Distributed Republic that is creedless and amorphous but anchored to each other through randomized trust exercises. These are the ideas I read science fiction for and in true Stephenson fashion they are well grounded in reality. For example, one of the final stages of the main character, Nell's, education is based in Turing machines that form the foundation of modern computers, as well as the future nanotech. The crypto and routing ideas woven into the other tech all ring true. The result is when Stephenson makes a more fantastic reach (e.g. cities floating on air, or disposable chopsticks made of animated screens) the reader is more than happy to accept that it's not just possible, but an inevitable consequence of the technology.

I don't want to give a rote plot summary, but in the midst of this technology Stephenson still weaves a story that is engaging and compelling. To be honest though, despite the fact that it ends well, Stephenson's characters are never the main event to me, and almost always tend to feel like expository devices. This isn't a criticism, I view it more as the product of the scope of his work. The characters still grow and change over the 20 year timeline, but at the end of the story I was much more interested in the repercussions in the world rather than the specific outcomes. I felt for Nell, I rooted for her, but her story is mostly that of the Chosen One, despite being grounded in technology and chance rather than prophecy. The other characters were sympathetic and fine, well realized, but mostly served their purpose and then collected at the end to be eyes on the Battle of Shanghai. I'm mostly referring to Carl Hollywood and Miranda (and Bud, Judge Fang et. al. in different ways) but even Hackworth, who is as close to a second main character as we get, instigates the initial plot by creating and counterfeiting the Primer, and then checks out for half the timeline (while with the Drummers) only to return with selective amnesia as a vector to explain and effect the Celestial Kingdom's endgame.

Regardless, The Diamond Age is a masterpiece of science fiction and was really hard to put down once I got far enough into the story to get hooked.

I'm vaguely a fan of Doctorow in the real world. I've read BoingBoing on and off, I relate to the perspective he brings to his work, of a sort of radical technologist concerned with information freedom. I identify with and align with that point of view.

That said, this novel was meh. I ended up giving it a 2 because it just reads too plainly and the conflict was utterly neutered by the utopian setting. The society Doctorow portrays is like Star Trek (post-scarcity) meets Altered Carbon (post-death) but it's really hard to have consequences when you live in a world in which the worst possible thing to happen to you is your social score goes down.

There are two components to the overall story. The main one is Julius, Lil, and Dan effectively defending their slice of Disney World from Debra - who represents a social threat of modernizing and thus discarding whatever special magic Julius et. al. ascribe to the place. The second component is discovering who arranged to kill Julius but that ends up being an utterly pointless dead end of a storyline that I expected to have a more interesting conclusion. Julius guesses correctly (in the abstract) who killed him, and then it's revealed his friend Dan was part of the plot... in order to gain enough Whuffie (social currency) to suicide with a high score. This mystery is officially solved in like one sentence (Dan's confession) and then nothing comes of it.

It's a common theme that all of the characters, who read like Doctorow stand ins, are perfectly rational up to the instant that they need to do something dumb to advance the plot. Dan's actions are stupid... there may be few predictable consequences of Julius' death but he's still going to fuck over his best friend for Whuffie when he's already in line for a bunch of it? Does not compute. Then Julius' actions to fight Debra never make sense. His behavior can be hand waved by his malfunctioning implants (which he also irrationally doesn't fix), but that doesn't somehow excuse his actions. He crawls into a tube to destroy Debra's work with some sort of EMP gun, and fails, then later when the heat is really on, he just flat breaks in and takes a hammer to everything. And for what? He states that he only believes it will buy him one or two days (and it ends up being a week) so he burned all of his social credit for a few days of breathing room? Lil and Dan start an affair out of nowhere, and are revealed when Julius comes online for a few moments and they're basically sexting each other in his presence assuming he can't see their locally public messages. What?

Even the motivations of the main antagonist, Debra, make no sense to me. Everyone's gaming to get their Whuffie score higher but at what point is enough enough? Domination seems to be her motivation, Julius believes she wants to control the entire park. But she also theoretically came from Disney World Beijing where she did great. So she's going to risk her Whuffie (and eventually lose it) by engineering Julius' death... and for what? The prestige of running a slice of theme park? Even if you buy that for her take over of the Hall of Presidents, what is her motivation for annexing the Haunted Mansion? How much better can she live with more Whuffie? As Julius mentions when he's become an outcast (for his irrational actions) even the baseline life in Bitchun Society is more luxurious than 99.9999% of all humans that ever lived. It's hard for me to believe that Debra is just that bent on Disney World when she could be literally anywhere else in the world building her own theme park from scratch if she wanted.

Fundamentally, I like this concept of the post-scarcity world and this social ranking meritocracy ("ad-hocracy") to determine who gets control of what (down to who can use the elevator or rent a hotel room) but the entire conflict is undermined by the fact that the very worst possible thing that could ever happen, the thing Julius is trying so hard to avoid, is that he gets kicked out of running a theme park ride and is forced to find something else to do in this wonderful utopia. The horror.

Some of the tangents (like Zora, or the U of T experience at the beginning of Bitchun Society) are more interesting than the main plot, but ultimately also unfulfilling. The themes were better explored in books like Altered Carbon (which came out a year before) or in the Culture books which deal with the post-scarcity and relatively post-death plot by having a galactic scale.

I would have loved to read more about what it means to be broke and undesirable in the Bitchun world, hitting notes similar to Black Mirror's Nosedive episode 15 years earlier. Or even explore the cultures that resist Bitchun society referenced early on (sort of like the Culture's Contact section on a small scale). Unfortunately, as it is the story is less Down and Out and more In the Magic Kingdom.

Speaking of... I've never been to Disney World so I spent a lot of this novel feeling like the setting was completely undescribed. Doctorow name drops a ton of attractions that I've never seen. I have no idea what the Haunted Mansion at Disney World looks like now, much less a hundred years into a post-scarcity future. I kept feeling like there was implicit information that I was expected to have but didn't - I was basically hanging in space. Even outside of the park, Doctorow seems pathologically averse to actually telling the reader about the surroundings instead relying on tropes. Unfortunately, that also makes it feel like early 21st century rather than whatever far future timeframe the story is set in.

Anyway, I was pretty disappointed in this book. I was expecting something a little more clever and absurd on a far future Disney backdrop, something akin to Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash that Doctorow directly references. Instead I got a really amateurish storyline set in a world that eliminates all consequences and never fleshes out what could be a really interesting setting.

I ended up enjoying this Discworld novel, but I can see why people generally don't rank the Witches series very highly (and I say that as someone who's read Equal Rites / Wyrd Sisters as well).

The first half of this book I was in danger of putting it down (like I did with Moving Pictures) because it seemed like a bunch of disconnected chances for the three witches to comment on real-world cultures from a sort of backward Lancre (rural UK) point of view. There's comedy there, but it's not so compelling.

I'm glad I stuck it out for the second half, however, because once the witches finish traveling and start to pursue the main plot it becomes a lot more interesting and coherent. Exploring the nature of stories and their unrealistic expectations, and even adding some interesting depth to the magic of Discworld. The end, in particular, really did a great job of tying the whole story together.

Definitely worth a read for Discworld fans, despite a bit of a slow start.