Posts Tagged ‘future’
Firebreak, by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Posted on: June 20, 2021
I was gonna write one of those really indepth reviews, where I give you all the background on Mallory’s world and “how we got here”. I even had it half written. But then I realized I wasn’t saying the most important thing first, and who the heck wants to read eight paragraphs to finally get to the most important thing, which is:
OMG Firebreak is SO SO SO GOOD. It’s got a TON of stuff going on, and I cried all the time while I was reading the end, a hustle based economy sucks, and when the government makes a few stupid decisions, the consequences last, um, forever. <deep breath> The first half of Firebreak was everything I wanted Ready Player One to be, smashed up with everything I wanted An Absolutely Remarkable Thing to be, and then the story went gloriously off the rails and I when I heard a name that rang a bell I realized I also recognized that sword/gun combo, and I ran and grabbed some other books off my bookshelf because I HAD to read those too all of a sudden. </and breathe>
Imagine if a superhero didn’t know who they were. Or maybe they did know, but they couldn’t escape their employers. Because they aren’t superheroes, they are property. They even have Merch!
Imagine if property decided to steal itself.
Firebreak is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Nicole Kornher-Stace is the best author you haven’t read yet. I love her books so much that I force my husband to read them. He described one of her earlier novels as the best novel he’s read in ten years, maybe ever. That’s it. That’s the review.
Oh, you want some more?
New Liberty City has their own Superheroes! Designed by Stellaxis, the Operatives keep the city safe from the invading corporation, Greenleaf. You can buy merch of the Operatives! They even have their own NPCs in the popular online MMO BestLife! Does your city have its own superheroes? Yeah, didn’t think so!
But the Supersoldier Operatives who are seen as superheroes are not citizens. According to Stellaxis, they aren’t even real people. They don’t even have names, only numbers, like 22, or 05. They were designed and built by Stellaxis, because it is important to Stellaxis to keep their city safe. When your apartment collapses around you, killing everyone you care about, when you are slowing dying of dehydration, Stellaxis will always be there.
Mallory makes part of a living livestreaming BestLife. When internet access is free, and there’s electricity for around 16 hours a day, grinding your way to the top of the charts is a cheap way to make some money, especially if you can score a sponsor who is willing to pay you in cash and water tickets. Oh, didn’t I mention? Stellaxis runs the city, charges for water, and you’ll be in even more debt up to your eyeballs if you end up in a rehydration clinic. People balance multiple jobs and gigs just to buy enough water to not die.
When Mal and Jessa score that unicorn sponsor, they agree to just ignore all the conspiracy theory bullshit the woman is spewing. But when her building completely disappears a few days later? When Mal meets a Supersoldier Operative in real life, streams her encounter, and goes viral? Maybe that disappearing sponsor was on to something after all. Mal doesn’t like attention. She never wanted to go viral.
The Operatives. What happens when you are a superhero and a slave, at the same time? What if you want a different life for yourself? Being a superhero only gets you killed some of the time. And if you are one of the lucky Operatives who didn’t die? It means you watched all your friends die.
The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum comes out on June 8th from Erewhon Books. I received an ARC from the publisher.
You know how some books give you #allthefeels?
The Unraveling gave me #allthethoughts in the best possible way.
At its heart, this novel is a coming of age/stumble into becoming an adult story. But everywhere else, it’s a giant beautiful thought experiment. Lots of science fiction and fantasy are thought experiments, and that’s what makes them so fun!
Fair warning though, getting into The Unraveling might feel like more work than fun. During the first few chapters I was on the strugglebus – who are all these people? What do all these terms mean? What the heck does doublebodied mean? For about 80 pages I was just as lost as I was intrigued (not unlike an Iain M. Banks Culture book, now that I think about it).
With zero introduction or infodumping, the narrative starts when the action starts, with a bustling family of many, many parents getting their only child, Fift, ready for the most important event of zir life. What made more sense much later was how nervous some of Fift’s parents were. #NotASpoiler – Fift does just fine. Well, at least at first.
In my opinion, the most important things about The Unraveling, the things that kept me reading and kept me thinking, had nothing to do with the plot. This book had so many ideas and social concepts that I have never seen before, so many “why not?”’s that I’d not thought of before, so many “what if’s”, so much that was new to me! Could be none of what’s in this book is new, but I doubt it.
What were all those why nots, and what ifs? Let me tell you all about them!
The BIG THING in The Unraveling is how gender is handled. The two genders are Staid (pronouns: ze, zir, zem) and Vail (pronouns: ve, vir, vem). For someone who has spent the literal last 40 years seeing she/he in stories, it took me a long time to get used to the pronouns. Ok, but here’s the cool thing – gender in this book has absolutely nothing to do with your plumbing, because why not? I did not expect it to, but this worked really well for me!
Staids are expected to be “the still center” with lives focused around intellectual studies, and Vails are pushed towards physical and emotive pursuits (I am grossly simplifying). Marriages are of typically of many adults of mixed genders, with the one major rule being that Staids do not share The Long Conversation with Vails, and Vails do not share their mat fights or other aggressively physical activities with Staids. The gender expectations are pretty strict, which was funny and fascinating.
Thanks to way-in-the-future-science, people can have whatever biology, plumbing, and body modifications they want whenever they want, customized however they want, allowing anyone to look any way they please, and to be a mother or a father with anyone they want. (and the science part doesn’t really matter, because this isn’t a story about how the science works. It’s a story about how people work) I thought that was all pretty damn cool, even though it did take me a good 200 pages for my brain to stop asking “yeah, but is this character a boy or a girl?”, because not only didn’t it matter if someone was a boy or a girl, this world doesn’t even have a concept of that. It’s perfectly fine to ask someone if they are a Staid or a Vail, and you’d typically be able to tell by their social behavior, but it would never occur to someone in this world to ask if someone was a boy or a girl, they don’t have the vocabulary for that and they don’t have a concept of that.
Read the rest of this entry »
So, I’ll give you the same “spoilers” that I gave my friends in my book club:
This book is really, really, good. Like, might be one of my favorite books that I read this year kind of good.
There is a really cool character named John.
Also, Maps! There is a map in the book! But it’s no good anymore, because the seas have risen just enough to move the shoreline. So where the map says there is a harbor? The harbor doesn’t look like that anymore!
Omg, so much cool stuff in this book!!!
Ok, other very, very minor spoilers ahead.
Have you read A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World? If you leave spoilers in the comments I will delete your comment and then say very mean things about you.
For those you who read this last year, and have been wondering what the hell took me so long, you were right! This book is awesome! I’m sorry it took me so long.
Ready? Let’s go.
It’s seems to be a year for me to read post apocalyptic stuff? Yeah, I didn’t plan that either. A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World takes place one or two generations after what people called “the gelding”. We don’t know what caused it, within a generation or two, humanity was near extinction. Hardly anyone could have kids. Some people think it was caused by pollution, some people think it was a bio-weapon, some people think it was from something sprayed in the air. (Huh, maybe Mother Nature is an introvert, and she finally had enough of this loud AFparty that she couldn’t ghost?)
A line from the beginning of the book:
In my whole life, I haven’t met enough people to make up two teams for a game of football. The world is that empty
This is a post- apocalyptic world, but the sun is still shining, you can still fish and hunt and do some basic farming, many places are still safe, and although the weather is warmer, it is still bearable. What this is, is a silent world. A world that no longer has a need for humans. All that silence? It was kinda refreshing, actually.
The History of Soul 2065 by Barbara Krasnoff
available June 2019
where I got it: Received advanced review copy (Thanks!)
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I’m gonna give you the bookends first, and then sorta kinda fill in the middle, ok?
My first thought about this book was “what’s up with that title? It makes no sense!”
My last thought when I was finishing the book was “oh, now I get it! The title makes sense now!”, and then a few pages later “oh. Now I really get it. Oh my.” An unplanned coincidence that I read that last story on the day before Passover.
Ok, now for all the tasty middle bits:
The History of Soul 2065 is a mosaic novel. What’s a mosaic novel you ask? Mosaic novels are strange and wonderful volumes that usually involve interconnected short stories or vignettes, they can have location and time-jumps, a character who is a child in one story may be a grandparent in another, someone who seems so important in one story may never show up again. Like most mosaic novels, many of the stores in The History of Soul 2065 appeared previously in other magazines and anthologies (such as Mythic Delirium magazine, Clockwork Phoenix, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Weird Tales, and Apex Magazine, among others), with a handful that were original to this novel. Some older stories have been slightly reworked to better fit into the chronology.
Reading The History of Soul 2065 is like looking through a photo album – and when you touch someone’s photo, you get pulled into what they were going through at the moment the photo was taken. Maybe when that photo was taken they were happy, maybe they were sad, maybe they were missing someone, maybe they had just helped someone. Krasnoff gilds the stories with magical realism, superstitions, and a few things you’ve just got to take on faith, and while she presents the family’s story in sort of chronological order in a healthy mix of longer stories and flash fiction length pieces, what she’s actually doing is telling a far more important story, and magically telling it backwards.
And yes, if you didn’t pick up in from the cover art, this is a very Jewish book. The two families involved in the stories are Jewish, there are constant cultural and religious references, historical references, faded numbers on arms. There are references to specific Jewish prayers, and these things are not explained in the text. As a Jew, I knew what they meant, non-Jews may not get the references (and that’s OK! That’s what Google is for). If you’ve never met someone who is Jewish, I can’t think of a better introduction to the Jewish culture than this book.
Many of my favorite stories were the ones that made my cry. Is that weird? Here are a few of my favorites, only some of which made me cry:
I came across “Sabbath Wine” in a Clockwork Phoenix anthology, are stories this beautiful supposed to make you cry so much? I was overjoyed to see that story as one of the openers in this novel, that I read it, cried a ton, and then I was trying to explain the plot of the story to my husband and was just a cry-y, snotty mess. It’s a story of two kids who become unlikely friends, and the friendship that their fathers forge. It’s a harsh reminder of how fractured Jewish communities can become, how cruel we can be to each other, and the unexpected oddness of finding you have something in common with a stranger.
“Hearts and Minds” didn’t make me cry, but it could have. And we get introduced to Ben! I have such a soft spot for him, but what is he doing in this story, playing cards with all these old people? If you ever want to know what my favorite kind of story telling twist is, it’s the one at the end of this story.
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso
Posted on: August 12, 2018
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso
Publishing date Aug 14th, 2018 (click here to pre-order)
Where I got it: Received copy for review from Apex Books*
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#sorrynotsorry, I’m going to give you a spoiler right out of the gate:
Nexhuman will offer you enough ideas and discussion topics and thought experiments to keep you busy for the next ten years. In fact, an entire Convention programming track could be built just around the questions and ideas in this book.
What Nexhuman does not offer is concrete answers to any of the questions that are brought up.
It’s something you should know before you pick up this book: If you are the kind of reader who wants a book to ask questions and then cleanly answer them, Nexhuman will be one confusing and disappointing read. On the flip side, if you enjoy science fiction books that ask questions about how society works, why humans act the way they do, why we make the decisions we make, how obsession and fear and passion work, a book that invites you to pull your own thoughts apart and examine them, and oh yeah, if you love beautiful prose that doesn’t rely on snark to get a point across, Nexhuman could be the best book you read this year. Interested in how any of this came about? Francesco Verso recently published a short essay in Apex Magazine about the origins of the novel.
Another spoiler: Nexhuman does not at all read like your typical popular American-style science fiction novel. What I mean by that is there is no snarky language for the sake of being snarky or shocky, no sexy cinematic scenes, the language is often raw and blunt, and the characters don’t really care if you like, agree with, relate to, or sympathize with them. I mean no disrespect to science fiction when I say that Nexhuman reads like literature.
Most of the novel takes place in or around a dump that overflows with consumer goods. For me, this novel was a connecting keystone for works such as Battle Angel Alita, Wall-E, John Scalzi’s Lock In, Ferrett Steinmetz’s The Uploaded, David Brin’s Kiln People, and other stories that touch on hyperconsumerism and leaving our fleshbodies behind for one reason or another.
Peter and his family make their living by clawing through the trash to find bits and pieces that can be resold, recycled, reused. Many household items are 5th, 6th, nth hand. Having something that is brand new is a status symbol, but also a symbol of flagrant waste. Even Peter’s prosthetic limbs are made of whatever he can find in the dump. If he wants a better arm or a better leg, he better hit the jackpot of finding outdated robot or android parts in the dump. I spent 80% of the book wondering if he was born with a birth defect, or if there had been an accident or infection that led to his amputations. Peter doesn’t like to talk about, and when I found how what had happened to him, not only did I realize why he hates to talk about it, but everything in the beginning of the book suddenly made a ton more sense!
Ok, so what the hell is this book about? On the edge of the dump is a commercial district. Teenage Peter has a puppy-dog crush on a young woman named Alba who works at the travel agency. He watches her from afar, he shyly says hello to her when she comes to unlock the business in the morning. He begins to view himself as her protector. She politely engages in conversation with him, asks him how his day is going, says hello. Alba is the first person in his life who has ever shown him the slightest bit of unconditional kindness, so it’s no wonder his crush turns into infatuation.
Is it before or after Peter’s brother’s gang attacks Alba and tears her body apart at the seams that Peter realizes she is a Nexhuman?
Artificial Condition, a Murderbot Diaries book, by Martha Wells
published May 8th 2018
where I got it: Purchased new
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If you’re not on the Murderbot bandwagon, start here. You’re welcome.
Also, I fucking love novellas. Running 80 – 200 pages, I can read the whole thing in a day or two, magically feeling like the world’s fastest reader. Recently, I’ve been needing to read a book twice before writing the review. So anyway.
I finished a reread of Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition same day my husband brought the video game Detroit: Become Human home. Both stories deal with ‘bots who are designed to look human, sound human, move like a human, and sorta kinda act like a human. Both stories deal with ‘bots who must obey human commands. Even when the commands are stupid. Going against your programming (responding to something in a human way) requires you to hack your own software, break yourself, doom yourself to being reprogrammed, or all of the above.
My experience with Detroit: Become Human consists of watching my husband play it for an hour or two, it’s a super high tech choose your own adventure story – to obey your asshole human owner but endanger the little girl, turn to page 8. To punch your asshole human owner and save the little girl, turn to page 12. Every choice you make as you are playing the ‘bot immediately and directly affects the story, and you can replay scenes over and over again to see how your different choices will affect your character’s future. It’s way cool!
In Artificial Condition, Murderbot is afraid of just about everything. Afraid of being caught and having a human tell it all the awful things it did. Afraid of being near humans and hurting them. Afraid of someone else figuring out it’s afraid. All Murderbot wants is to be left alone, where it can’t hurt anyone, and where no one can hurt it. Murderbot has vague, half memories of murdering a bunch of idiot humans. But only half memories. Did everything happen in the order it remembers? Did it happen at all? Is Murderbot maybe not the vicious killing machine it thinks it is? Murderbot needs to know what really happened.
Murderbot teams up with ART (ok, so maybe “teaming up” isn’t exactly how that goes? If I was more specific it would wreck everything) to get back to where it all began. I did get a chuckle out of Murderbot’s and ART’s conversations – these are both fancy pants AIs, so they aren’t exactly speaking out loud, it’s a silent room full of conversation. We’re actually nearly there in real life.
But Murderbot needs a way onto the industrial station where it became a killing machine, and the easiest quickest way to do that is to get an employment contract. To do that, Murderbot will need to talk to. . . people. And act like a . . . real person.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
Release Date: June 12th 2018
Where I got it: Received a review copy from the publisher (Thanks Tachyon!)
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How do you crew a ship whose mission will take hundreds or thousands of years? Let’s see, you could do a sleeper ship, a generation ship, for something a little more unusual you could go the route of Marina Lostetter’s Noumenon or David Brin’s Existence. Those options will surely cover you for a few hundred or maybe a thousand years. But what if the ship’s mission is even longer than that? What if we’re talking more like a million or more years?
The mission of the Eriophora is building a gate system through the galaxy. As the gate system grows, the outbound growth of mankind will surely follow. Sunday and many of her crewmates are forever hopeful that something almost human will come out of the next gate they build. They are forever hopeful that their ship will finally receive a radio message that it’s time to come home. It’s been sixty million years, and they are still waiting for that message. No wonder the crew forms a music appreciation club, it’s not like there is much of anything else to do. Yes, you read that correctly, they’ve been hurtling through the galaxy, awake for only a few days out of every few hundred or thousand, for sixty million years.
The solution sounded so simple, once upon a time. Raise a bunch of children to feel special, to feel chosen. Train them together, let them watch their AI grow and learn. Raise them to know the ship is their home, and everything they do, they do for the future and the betterment of mankind, and that being awake for 3 days out of every few hundred years is a completely normal thing. Trust the AI to keep them in line and convince them that it’s totally normal that in millions of years no one has invited them to come back home.
Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer
published in 2017
where I got it: purchased new
I finally read Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne. This book was on everyone’s Best of the Year list last year, so why did it take me so long to read it? Uhm… i dunno. Took me a while to get out of The Southern Reach, I guess. Guess I needed the closure that was the incredible oversensoryoverload scene at the end of Annihilation more than I thought. Anyway.
One of the nice things about read a book that had a lot of hype, a year after it came out, is that I can skip all the obligatory “what this book is about” crap, and get to the meat of what I wanna talk about in this not-a-review.
Seeing the Annihilation movie reminded me of how much I loved all the flashback scenes in the novel. I got to know the biologist through her flashbacks. Her character wasn’t only who she is right this second, while she is walking through Area X, but it’s all the things she did in her life that got her to be this particular person – the overgrown swimming pool, the tidepools, the isolated introvert-heaven projects, how she felt about herself and the world when she was outside. The biologist became who she is now, because of who she was then.
And that’s how I felt about Rachel. The short flashbacks of her youth, of being a refugee, of how she wished her parents didn’t feel like they had to put on a happy face for her all the time, that is how I knew who she was. By who she was then, I had a better feeling for the depths of who she is now. A well written flashback is a gem in a geode.
I’m a super tactile person. I hate wearing shoes and i joke that when I walk around barefoot that I’m seeing the room with my feet. It’s only half a joke, because in a sense that isn’t seeing, I really am experiencing the texture of the floor through my feet, and that is being transmitting to my brain as a way of “seeing” the floor. It’s a throwaway comment when Rachel mentions that she usually sleeps with her shoes on, that she hates taking her shoes off, something about an experience she had while she was a refugee. When I read that, my gut reaction was “how sad, for her to be blind in that way”. I felt bad for her, that she wouldn’t be able to see a room through her feet.
Among other things that he might be, Borne is one gigantic sensory organ. Once he starts talking and walking, and touching and tasting and “seeing the room through his feet”, he can’t stop. Well, he can’t stop doing those things just like he can’t stop doing some other things that he doesn’t like talking about. Just like you can’t say to yourself “hmm, i’d like to shut off my sense of sight, or my sense of smell today”. You can’t stop either. But for you, not being able to flip a switch to stop seeing, or smelling, or tasting, is normal. So why would someone expect someone else to just be able to stop seeing the room through their feet? Because we all want our kid to be fucking normal, that’s why.
So, I finished We Can Build You, by Philip K Dick.
There are spoilers ahead. #SorryNotSorry.
This book started out so interesting!! Lots of cool ideas, simulacrum robots who can pass for human (oh, hai cylons!), there was so much potential for conversations about what makes us alive and how would you know you were a simulacrum, and if you were a simulacrum how would it change you life and maybe it wouldn’t change your life at all. Could you convince yourself you were a robot? Could a robot convince themselves they were a human? My brain was overflowing with hope for interesting ideas. There is an Edward Stanton simulacrum, and then they make an Abraham Lincoln. Even more possibility for cool things to happen!
And then Louis had to decide he was in love with Pris.
Louis’s business partner is Maury, and Pris is Maury’s brilliantly creative but mentally unstable 18 year old daughter. She’s cold towards Louis (because why would an 18 year old be interested in her dad’s buddy? oh, that’s right, she isn’t), and the colder she is towards him, the more he becomes obsessed with her.
All those cool ideas? All those cool possibilities? The idea of Abraham Lincoln having to navigate the modern world? All out the window because Louis chases Pris all over the place, even though she is in a relationship with someone else, even though Maury forbids Louis from being in a relationship with his daughter. Really, the second half of this book was so fucking boring. I’d read like 5 pages and then fall asleep.
I guess if I read between the lines as far as possible, I could pull something out of this near-future society’s obsession with right thinking and skewed mental health, that we are being programmed to think and act a certain way, the way a robot is programmed, and when we aren’t acting correctly, when something is wrong with our mental health, we have to be institutionalized to be “reprogrammed”. Maybe that is what this novel is about? I had to get through what felt like 500 pages of Louis chasing and threatening people for Pris’s attentions, to get to that?
I was really hoping that at the end there would be some big reveal that Louis was a simulacrum, or maybe that Pris was. Spoiler! that doesn’t happen.
I got a few more Philip K Dick books floating around, I hope they are better.
The Tourist, by Robert Dickinson
Posted on: August 12, 2017
The Tourist, by Robert Dickinson
published June 2017
where I got it: received review copy from the published (Thanks Hachette!)
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Welcome to the 24th century, where the most exotic vacation a person can take is to a 21st century mall. Experience germs and cell phones, risk mild food poisoning and interactions with sullen gothy teenagers, and then spend the night safely ensconced in a resort hotel. There are tons of travel companies that offer these types of tours. The companies and their employees choose to ignore all the smuggling that often takes place right under their noses. Time travel has become so easy and common, it’s not even called “time travel” anymore, it’s just called “travel”, and you get to your destination via a high energy technology called translation.
“It’s the logic of travel: the past is just another country, and, if you can afford the translation, you can always go back. Nothing is lost, nobody really dies. You die, of course: but, if they have the right resources, other people can always come back and see you. You remain alive.”
The Tourist, page 310
The opening chapters of The Tourist fall somewhere between Kage Baker’s Company novels and the movie Twelve Monkeys, complete with a shadowy future century no one is allowed to see, rumors of a genocide in recent history, a near extinction event, and the challenges of how to tell someone you are from the past or the future. There is a “map” of sorts in the front of the book, that on first glance looks like a map of a shopping mall, but then you realize it’s a chart of a time line. The time line is U shaped, with the character’s lives jumping back and forth all over the place. Ahh, the tricks you can play in a time travel book!
Spens is a rep with one of the travel agencies, his job is to shepherd his charges to the mall, show them how paper money works, and warn them against 21st-ers who know how to trick naive idiots. For shock value, he buys a muffin at a coffee stand and eats it. This is just a job for Spens, he lives at the resort and gets together for drinks with the other reps at night to share stories of their idiot clients. He’ll work at the resort forever if it means he never has to work the tunnels again.
And then one day he loses a client.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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