Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
© 2002 Richard K. Morgan
416 pages

Takeshi Kovacs,  soldier-turned-commando-turned rogue,  is rudely awakened with a job.  Imprisoned for two hundred years, he’s now being offered the chance of parole if he can solve a murder.  Or should it be attempted murder? The victim’s head was blown off, but being rich,  a backup copy of his consciousness was simply downloaded into a waiting clone.    You can do that in the future, you know: your consciousness is stored on a chip within your neck, and if you die...well, if you’ve the means your friends or family  can just copy your consciousness into any available body. (There’s likely to be quite a few, since people imprisoned go into digital storage, their bodies rented out.)    Kovacs’ patron is an exceedingly long-lived and unthinkably rich fellow who wants to find out who killed him, and why they tried to mock it up like a suicide.  Although Kovacs has never been to Earth before,  between his past service in the interstellar military and his training, he’s more than prepared to learn what he needs and solve the mystery.   As cynical as he is, however, Kovacs is about to enter a story grimier than he could have imagined.

I’ve been in a science fiction mood as of late, and recently watched Altered Carbon on Netflix in its entirety.  Finding and reading the original novel was an obvious followup, although the  background of Tak  and of the chief antagonist vary quite a bit between the mediums.  What hasn’t changed is the main plot and premise:  in this future, human civilization is interplanetary,  but the few who need to  travel between  settled worlds  do so by transferring their consciousness to a body-for-hire (a "sleeve") there. Tak is an expert in sleeve-switching, having done it professionally and usually with a dose of psychotropics that inhance intelligence, creativity,  etc.   A manufactured killer, Tak has enormous incentive to figure out what  who tried to kill his patron -- especially when he narrowly escapes being killed by a squad of  hitmen at his hotel. They knew him by name, despite the fact he's never been on planet and has been on ice for quite some time.

Although Tak's personality is not exactly winsome, he does have allies, chiefly a cop who keeps showing up. Kristin Ortega has her own reasons for shadowing Tak: he doesn't know it, but he's wearing the body of her boyfriend,  imprisoned on suspicion of being a bent cop. Together they explore a story and a world saturated in sex and violence.   It turns out that when you live for century after century,  there's really no limit to how depraved you can get. Frankly, it makes for disgusting reading at times, and I continued with the show and the book only because the premise  was and continues to be...well, absorbing.  The chip integrated into the neck -- the cortical stack -- doesn't just allow for immortality for those with the means and the desire. It allows people to spend time in virtual realities -- sometimes against their will, as those being interrogated know. The cortical stack expands the human potential for experience: not only can people explore different bodies, but drugs can be fine-tuned for their specific metabolism.  All this available pleasure creates an atmosphere of jadedness, however, not of contentment, and the sad restlessness that permeates the world here is not all that unfamiliar. The detective story, when it's not submerged in blood, sex, and sadism, is genuinely interesting --  even considering that I'd already experience the story.   The antagonist has a special connection to Tak in the Netflix series which makes their interactions with Tak all the more tragic in the endgame, but that relationship is absent here, and...well, it makes things less intense.

Despite the frequent...unpleasantness, I imagine Altered Carbon  will be one of those books I can't forget about at the end of the year. I don't think I'll be continue in the series, though  -- the sex and violence are too detailed for my tastes.

German title, just because it looks cool:

Kill Decision

Kill Decision

© 2012 Daniel Suarez

512 pages

Seemingly every day people within the United States are killed,  destroyed in apparent bomb attacks.  The victims have no obvious connections, but they are not random – nor were they bomb victims.  A new generation of cheap, lethal drones are waging an undeclared war on American soil, and no one knows who is behind them.    Enter Linda McKinney, a  young American scientist,  whose study of weaver ants in Africa was interrupted when she was kidnapped, shortly before her cabin was incinerated.    McKinney hasn’t been abducted by terrorists, however:  she is the last hope of a black ops organization hunting for the drones’ controllers.  The few leads they have indicate that the same people who stole software allowing for the drones’ facial recognition software also copied McKinney’s research into swarm intelligence.   

Kill Decision is a horse of a different color from Suarez’ other works: although still a mix of technothriller and science fiction,   there’s far less speculation here than in Change Agent and Freedom. Frankly,   the plot of Kill Decision seems like the sort of thing that could happen this afternoon.  I’ll admit to not being up to date on the latest drone technology, but given the current status of facial recognition technology,   machine intelligence, and the price of consumer electronics....the premise of Kill Decision is speculative only in the “What if this did happen” sense, and not the “What if this could happen” sense.      The novel follows the un-named group investigating the drone attacks as their efforts to get to the root of the problem only increase in the planned-for campaign being ramped up,  leading to  a prolonged action sequence where the chasee- and chaser swap places several times, with brief interludes between the bloody chaos.  

Although drones aren’t a particular interest of mine, Kill Decision succeeded in keeping my attention, in part because the drones’ behavior strongly mimics that of...weaver ants, complete with using chemical compounds for swarm communication.  The drones of Kill Decision have total autonomy behind their prescribed targets,  evaluating and taking care of unexpected threats on the fly. The drones combine the innate horror of swarm insects with the cold dread of being hunted most effectively,  especially when the team encounters the base of operations.  

Although I hadn't intended to read Suarez' remaining works, both of are beyond the near-future subgenre I most prefer,  having read so much of him recently has me itching to give one of them a try, if only to experience more of the author!

Related:
Drone, Mike Maden

Limited Wish

The universe is trying to kill Nick. Again. Last time, it was only leukemia. Now there are multiple visitors from divergent futures asking him for help breaking into a nuclear power plant, he's being stalked by a sociopathic mercenary, he's stumbling through one near-miss after another, and worst of all....the fate of the universe apparently depends on him going to a dance and leaving with the right date.   Ah, to be sixteen again!

Limited Wish is a follow up to One Word Kill, a SF novel interlaced with Dungeons and Dragons lore, and set in the mid-1980s.   Limited Wish continues that fusion, although there's not as much of the creepy mirroring of events and characters in the D&D campaign and the real world goings on.   The plot itself, however,  echoes the plot of the first book, and not accidentally; it's something to do with temporal mechanics. History not repeating itself but rhyming is a side effect of some paradox that's erupted.   What's different is that while last time Nick was told exactly what was going on,  this time his visitors from the future are just as confused as he is: in fact, the future-me from the last book pops up here, but it's an earlier him who is still trying to figure things out.

Although it's intended for younger audiences, I believe,  this series is fun so far.

Change Agent

Change Agent
© 2017 Daniel Suarez
417 pages

Deep into the 21st century,   global civilization has been transformed by bioengineering.  Consumer products  which were once manufactured are now grown, from knives to car bodies; the streets are illuminated not by bulbs, but by bacteria;  and lab-grown meat is common.  Although gene editing has also been used to cure several prominent diseases in human babies,   parents are increasingly interested in going beyond repair:  they want to make their children into  designer augments, with heightened intelligence, physical strength, and so on. Enter Kenneth Durand, who uses statistical analysis to figure out where "baby labs" are so that the police can shut them down.   But the many labs shut down by Durand's ingenuity aren't independent operations: they're all run by the same criminal enterprise, and they - -the Huli jing --  will  have their revenge in a most insidious way. A violent encounter at a train station leaves Durand writhing on the platform, and he wakes up weeks later -- after a prolonged period of intense pain and semi-consciousness -- to find himself transformed. His own genes have been edited to make him into the monster he was chasing.  Friendless and the subject of an international manhunt, a once pacifistic statistician  must find new strength within himself as he escapes police custody and descends into the underworld looking for answers and a way to reclaim his identity.

 First of all, there's a lot of really cool things going on in the background here.  Logistical drone lanes, for one: there are so many commercial drones that they've been given air lanes to travel in, just like airplanes.    Screen interfaces are largely a thing of the past;  as most people have the means to have images cast directly into their eyes. (This can be a nuisance, with the advertisements, but there are countermeasures.)  All this advanced technology makes Durand's life considerably more difficult after he's branded a criminal;  one push notification from the police and a crowdsourced manhunt makes it impossible for him to move in civilized society.   He does, however, have one asset:  the criminal whose body he's inhabiting happens to be incredibly intimidating, and since he wasn't expected to survive the transformation (the gang wanted the police to think their most-wanted man had  been assassinated) , there have been no countermeasures put in place to stop Durand from taking advantage of his appearance.  Once  the Huli jing realize he's escaped and on the move, another product of bioengineering is tasked with hunting him down.

Using CRISPR and succeeding technology opens up a world of possibilities, and Suarez explores both the good and bad. Durand's journey will culminate in discovering horrors he couldn't imagine people capable of,  though if he'd read Brave New World he wouldn't be so darkly surprised.   Both the worldbuilding, and Durand's struggle to hold on to his identity -- trapped in another body, forced into doing things he'd never otherwise do --  succeed in creating a fast-moving and immersive tale of tomorrow.

Freedom™

Freedom™
©  2010 Daniel Suarez
416 pages

The global economy is crashing, nearing its end, but few are willing to recognize it. The sinking markets, soaring inflation and unemployment, and civil chaos are regarded by those in power as merely another hiccup, one which can be weathered out with enough money thrown at the problem. But away from the old centers of power, inside server rooms and sewer tunnels, a new order is being created -- one driven by the vision of a legendary AI programmer, now deceased, whose death triggered the activation of a distributed AI intelligence which -- in the events of Daemon -- began spreading and recruiting human agents to effect its will.   In the midst of a global depression, many are dropping out of the old economy and tuning into another: the darknet economy of the Daemon,   But the one cannot tolerate the other,  and in Freedom™,   we witness their final grapple.

Both Daemon and Freedom™ are all kinds of interesting; the former, for its technical premise; the latter, for its sociological premise.  The Daemon has evolved from the first novel,  though I don't want to go into many details for fear of spoiling anything.  Suffice it to say....the cold, ominous voice in the head no longer stars here, but rather what it and its human recruits have created does.  The distributed intelligence of the Daemon is becoming a distributive economy and democracy,  one counter to the globalized commercial order.  The imprint of the Daemon's creator, Sobol is still very strong, as agents are ranked by classes and levels and given quests to fulfill;   those who succeed gain levels and access to additional technological abilities made possible by the augmented reality that Daemon agents live in. However, the members of this new society also guide its goals, and the quest of a main character is to prove that humanity merits freedom rather than total control by the Daemon.

Any adult will recognize the imprint of the 2008 recession on this book, from the anxiety and fear over the economic future to the outrage over abuses of corporate power. Anti-corporatism pervades this book, in part because their greed and corruption has created the global crisis-- not just the inflation and such, but  increasing fragility of people and nations, depending on as they do delicate ribbons of trade and a steady stream of raw materials mined without a thought to the future.  The corporate powers also  target the darknet counter-economy, fighting against it through means both subtle and obvious. As with Daemon, I truly didn't know where the novel was going to end until we'd arrived.  What's most fascinating about Freedom, though, is Suarez' implied argument about the inherent fragility of global society and the need for social structures which are more resilient.

Daniel Suarez is so effective a writer that after I finished this, I started reading Daemon again -- just to experience the chilling birth of the series once more.  I've gotta see if Suarez's craft is so strong when he's not basing his story on his experience as a network engineer and D&D dungeonmaster, and so I have purchased his Kill Decision and Change Agent, tech thrillers about autonomous drones and biotech respectively.

Related:
Triangulation interview with Suarez about his book "Change Agent"; extensive interview which goes into the writing of Daemon and Freedom.

One Word Kill

©  Mark Lawrence 2019
260 pages

Nick's young life was shattered when he got the diagnosis: cancer.  Leukemia, specifically.  The odds weren't good that he'd live five years to see the 1990s.  But whatever was happening to him, inside, something else was happening. Out of nowhere, Nick would find himself sitting in last week, or encountering ghosts of himself running down a street in terror, or casually ambling up the staircase at his friends' home. His friends were an imaginative bunch -- they loved playing Dungeons and Dragon together, wiling away entire days exploring worlds that existed only on graph paper -- but they wouldn't believe  this. And then there's that strange, silent, man who keeps appearing in the distance -- waiting, waiting. What is going on?

I almost never respond to Amazon's frequent book adverts in my email,  but this one caught my attention. The 1980s? Dungeon and Dragons? It worked for Ready Player One, so why not here?    This is nothing like RPO, however;  One Word Kill is its own...strange...yet fascinating story.  Suffice it to say, the mysterious goings-on and the watching stranger  do not stay unaccounted for every long, and Nick and his friends are soon saddled with a dangerous quest,  one made more complicated by the presence of a sociopathic drug peddler turned casual murderer and arsonist stalking one of the kids.   What took me about this novel was not the ultimate plot, which leaves  big questions unanswered (it's part of a series, naturally) and seems kind of silly on the face of it. Rather, it's the emotional resonance Lawrence creates around young Nick,  who has to sit with his illness -- at first alone, because he doesn't want to tell his kids -- as it changes his perspective. Maybe because I so recently experienced  Red Dead Redemption  2 and its story of a disease-stricken outlaw trying to do something good with his life, growing in wisdom and perspective even as things are falling apart around him, that Nick's own  perspective born of despair seemed so poignant.    I plan to give the second book a try, as it seems like the other part of the story -- the part that makes this one a little more sensible -- will be told there.

Highlight:

"And I realised that just as the disease was starting to take me away from the world, I was for the first time, in a short and self-absorbed kind of life, starting to really see it for what it was. The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it."

Head On

Head On: A Novel of the Near Future
© 2018 John Scalzi
328 pages

Agent Chris Shane of the FBI saw the man decapitated on the playing field. before his very eyes.  But so did thousands of other people; decapitations  were, in fact,  the point of the game. Hilketa, after all, is a sport in which human-controlled droids go into battle against one another,  trying to tear the head off a randomly-designated player-droid and carry it across the goalposts while the defending team stops them.  This is a game played with swords. Of course heads are supposed to come off....but people aren't supposed to die.   And yet, the moment Duane Chapman's droid lost his head, the human controlling him inexplicably died.   So it was that Chris and his training partner Van, abuser of many substances,  had their second huge case.  In Head On, Scalzi explores the world of Hadens more thoroughly, from their elaborate digital world to specialized droids -- some for lovers and some for fighters.  Although Van and Chris are able to establish the means easily enough, the question remains: why? Why would someone murder a reasonably popular, reasonably talented  athlete?  The mystery takes readers down familiar paths, from the noir staples like jealous wives, to Scalzi's running joke of Shane destroying a series of personal threeps (the humanoid droid he moves in the world through, his real body being locked-in from Haden syndrome).  Scalzi's Haden-world is just as interesting this time around, though I was more fascinated by Haden culture than the actual murder mystery.

Magnificent Nine

Firefly: The Magnificent Nine
pub. 2019 James Lovegrove
384 pages

Jayne Cobb is not the most conventionally faithful man aboard the good ship Serenity; he did, after all, enter Mal's service for purely mercenary ends.  But there's more to him than a surly hired gun; he is, as the show indicated, a man who works to support an ailing mother and brother. He has loyalties, and when he receives a wave from an old friend whose planet is being taken over by a criminal gang who ape Reavers,, that troth-keeping Jayne emerges.    Though Serenity is, as usual, flying on a wing and a prayer, with little reserves in food, money, or ammunition,   Mal is too good a man to pass up a hopeless cause involving fighting cretinous bullies.   When the old flame reveals she has a daughter....named Jane....things get complicated.

Magnificeent NIne is a straightforward action tale, though replete with the fun banter one expects from the Firefly crew, and  a couple of ridiculous situations. Lovegrove again displays a good grasp on the characters' voices and the interplay of their personalities;  Zoe and Wash are especially fun, but of increasing interest in this book is that between Jayne and River.  As with Lovegrove's previous novel, every member of Serenity has a role to play.  I thoroughly enjoyed the story, as well as the deepening of Jayne Cobb.

Locked In (and Unlocked)

Lock In
and Unlocked, a bonus novella
pub. 2014 John Sclazi
336 pages
Read by Wil Wheaton

It looks, from the outside, like a simple case. There’s a body with a knife in it, recently planted. There’s a man in the room who was in there when said body developed a sudden case of knife-in-chest. Obviously he did it, or at least he saw it happen.   But it’s not a simple case, because the suspect might have had someone in his head at the time.  

…right, that bears more explaining.  25 years ago, a disease swept the planet and reduced the global population by a billion, between the people it killed outright and those it left trapped in their own bodies, their brains so altered by the virus they can no longer  make use of their voluntary nervous systems.  One of the most prominent victims of the disease was the president’s  wife, and  in grief the chief executive threw everything the United States had at the disease.  The three trillion devoted to finding a cure, however, delivered something else: it delivered ways for the locked-in to experience the world through the eyes, ears, and other senses of humanoid robots, or even other humans –  when not otherwise escaping their bodies into the digital playground known as the Agora.   The ability of the locked in to borrow someone else's body is why this murder is going to get complicated, especially after it turns out that someone's body can be borrowed without their permission. 

Enter Chris Shane,  one of the first  to use those humanoid robots now known as Threeps, who works for the FBI investigating crimes relating to the locked-in population, commonly known as Hadens after the most famous victim of the disease.   Along with a chain-smoking detective who also has a Haden connection,  they'll find that the truth is far more complicated still. A police mystery develops, through technological twists and turns,  into a general thriller, and Shane finds a way -- with the help of the Navajo nation -- to expose the truth.   Although I was worried from the start that the plot would be a little too complex to follow via audiobook,  I was able to keep up fairly well, and the premise is so fascinating in itself that I thoroughly enjoyed the 'oral history of Haden's syndrome' which followed the novel proper. (It's a World War Z esqe  narrative based on  interviews with doctors, reporters, politicial figures, engineers, etc which explains the backstory in full. It's a lot more interesting to read after the novel, however,  rather than spoiling the emerging world beforehand.)

Scalzi's book makes for a fun mystery in itself, especially for those of us who prefer near-future SF.   There are many SF references, of course, the biggest being that the humanoid robots are called Threeps after the first person to use one spotted herself in a mirror sand said "I look like C-3P0!" Lock In's world is essentially our own,  except for the mind-controlled robots. The autonomous vehicles so common here are nosing their way into society now, and I daresay it won't be long before we have glasses or implants to experience the  ubiquitous "digital world" without the use of phones.  The emergence of Hadens victims as a distinct 'ethnic' group, or at least a subculture, is particularly fascinating, and I plan to read the next book in this series.

Regarding the audiobook specifically: Wheaton is fantastic, but  there was some obvious line-patching in which the volume and tone of one sentence suddenly didn't flow with the others. That's the first time I've heard any problems in an Audible presentation, but didn't detract too much from Wheaton's otherwise standard-stellar performance.  Unlocked uses numerous different actors for the interviewees, a choice I'm most impressed by. It would have been easy and cheap just to have a pair of male and female authors reading the lines, but the different actors give their personas real distinction, and often definite personality -- the stunned doctor and the jaded criminal were especially memorable.

Big Damn Hero

Firefly: Big Damn Hero
© 2018 Nancy Holder and James Lovegrove
336 pages

"Well, look-at-this!  Seems we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us?"

"Big damn heroes, sir."

"Ain't we just?"

I am a patient miser who almost never buys books new, preferring to wait until used copies hit the market. But when I learned that there was a Firefly novel scheduled for release, I preordered and didn't blink.  Set during the run of the show, Big Damn Hero  delivers as close as we'll get to another episode of the shiniest show that ever ran. At its opening, Mal Reynolds and the good ship Serenity are looking for work, trying to recover their reputation after the Niska disaster, and necessity compels them to take a questionable payload of explosives from the even-more questionable person of Badger.  Mal's been asked to see a local businessman about a smaller delivery he can handle on the way, but something goes awry: emerging from an epic bar fight, Zoe and Jayne quickly realized the captain's been kidnapped. With destabilizing explosives in the hold, and Mal in the hands of parties unknown, Zoe and the whole Serenity gang have to work double time to figure out what's gone awry before matters get worse.  

Big Damn Hero offers a fast-moving plot (a two-day story) and all the flavor of the show that Browncoats should enjoy; Holder and Lovegrove have a good ear for the show's peculiar mix of frontier drawls peppered with Chinese expressions,  and  none of the characters from the ship are overlooked in contributing to the resolution: it's very much an all-hands on deck kind of story,  bringing even Book and Inara into the thick of things.  The show's humor runs throughout, from Mal's verbal harrying of his captors, to Zoe and Wash's playful banter and Jayne's mix of wiles and tactlessness.  River is...well, River,  playing a flute to calm the explosives down and providing just the right amount of insight to get the team out of tight corners. There are plenty, too;  with so many members of the crew separated in the search for answers.  Zoe, never a weak character -- never -- is in fine form hre, hobbling round town on a fractured leg, keeping  the crew focused despite River's episodes and Jayne's fits and Kaylee's near panic at the idea of leaving the captain behind.  The only fly in the ointment is the questionable backstory about the Alliance and the Independents, as the settling of this system is portrayed simplistically with rich people buying the core planets and leaving the poor people to the frontier planets, and then there being some confusion about the independents "seceding" from the Union...which they were not part of to begin with.  That's relatively minor, though,  perhaps on the scale of arguing about Klingon head makeup.    

Big Damn Hero will find an audience, I think, not just because it's a new story in a beloved franchise, but because it also adds to that Firefly universe by fleshing out Mal's past and the people he loved and fought by. I enjoyed it thoroughly and hope this series keeps flying. 

H+

H+ Incorporated
© 2018 Gary DeJean
188 pages

Note: I read from an advanced review copy of this book sent to me by the author via Goodreads.

In the mid-21st century, Manila faced total destruction in the wake of hurricanes and rising seas,  but rose to the challenge -- literally, by rebuilding upon floating platforms and throwing the doors open to foreign tech firms that wanted to explore the outer limits of what's possible with as little outside prying as possible.  The result was an explosion of technological innovation, especially in the realm of cybernetics,  but not the kind of growth that absorbs a lot of people into the labor pool. While impoverished dissidents grumble and protest, the police are putting the fruits of innovation to the test, with exoskeletons that allow them to push back ever harder. But when someone within H+, the leading cybernetic warfare firm, goes rogue, a father  and his small son in a cybernetic body are caught in the middle of explosive confrontations between tech-hippies and corporate military police.

Although I'm not a transhumanist, I am very interested in the medical applications of bioengineering, and was  completely immersed in this novel from the start, as it opens with a father taking his son to a support group meeting for people sporting a variety of prosthetics -- and not just limbs, but faces. Some of the people there were injured, and some are actively interest in augmenting themselves with technology. The little boy, Jake Patel, is almost completely artificial,  as most of his organic body was crushed in a building collapse. As the story develops, the young boy will be befriended by others at the meeting, most importantly a woman with a bionic eye, who introduces him to an underground community of bod-modders.  Another thread of the story follows a military vet who is invited to join a private security contracting group using exoskeletal suits, and the stories collide at a warehouse where a spectacular over-use of force against civilians sees young Jake lose his prosthetic body, and his father thrown in prison.  Jake himself, his brain -- remains free and safe in the care of friends. There's probably a college essay in that, the mind free despite the body imprisoned,  but Jake's brain finds another home soon enough, in a purloined prototype that will make him less a victim and more a rebel himself.

Although H+'s size keeps it from  being complex, the use of a security contractor as a viewpoint character prevents the villains from becoming faceless baddies. Although I principally read this out of interest for the cybernetic applications (which are varied -- bodysuits, telepresence, and organ/limb replacement are a few), it moves quickly into an action-drama novel. According to the author,  it was  developed as a screenplay and then adapted into a novel as well.

Related:
Machine Man, Max Barry.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
© 1818 Mary Shelley
288 pages

"Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth."

An attempt to reach the North Pole is interrupted by the sight of eerie figures chasing one another upon the ice, and they have a tale of misery to recount.  The man rescued by the ship, Victor Frankenstein,  was an enthusiast of natural philosophy, and specifically the the power to create life.    Captain Walton of the polar exploration vessel had been yearning for the friendship of someone who wanted to probe nature's darkest mysteries, but Frankenstein's story proved to be one of warning rather than encouragement.  After relating his early fascination with occult figures and scientists alike, Frankenstein describes the horror he experienced when he succeeded in actually bringing a cobbled-together man to life, and how it pursued him across Europe, driven by despair and wrath at having been created.  The monster himself also appears in the story, both through Frankenstein's recollection -- the two have a confrontation in which the monster recounts his pitiful life thus far and charges Frankenstein with giving him a companion that he can flee into exile with -- and aboard the ship as the last, before he disappears in a wintry haze. 

I read Frankenstein in one sitting, which I hadn't expected to do.  The monsters of Halloween have never had a great appeal for me, so most of this -- besides the scientist making a man --  was completely new.  This Norton critical edition proved highly readable,  supported with annotations to explain period-specific references or vocabulary which now borders on archaic. There's no getting around this book being a warning about the reckless pursuit of knowledge at any cost;  beyond Frankenstein's attempt at creating life, which only resulted in a string of bloody murders and the destruction of both creature and creation,   there's also the frequently-mentioned destruction of native American societies, specifically Mexico and Peru, as a result of enthusiastic exploration.  Captain Walton himself proves to be someone who can learn from other's mistakes, as -- faced with hostile polar conditions that threaten his ship and crew -- he retreats to England.  There were certainly surprises here, like the description of the creature as "beautiful" -- save for his eyes. (I wonder if, given that eyes were regarded as windows to the soul, if repulsive eyes hinted at the beast's depravity or brutishness.)    

This Norton critical edition is particularly helpful in understanding the book. While I only read the story proper,  it also contains a short essay on different versions of the story -- one edit implies the monster dies, another leaves his future shrouded in a storm -- as well as period responses and related poetry. 

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
© 2003 Cory Doctorow
202 pages

In the not-very-distant future,  death is an inconvenience, and material goods are no longer scarce. Instead, the currency of society is reputation,  and Jules needs all of his reserves to get through the next year of his life.  The trouble began when he was shot dead at Disney World.  A brain backup was soon downloaded into a freshly-grown clone, and soon he was back in business keeping the old Disney World -- an artifact from the distant past,  run by volunteers who loved  the primitive animatronics  --in working order.  Something had changed in the brief blip of time he spent unconscious, however: a group of fellow "adhocs" running Disney World decided to inflict change on the Hall of Presidents,  and they could only be after the Haunted Mansion next.  Jules is desperate to hold back the tide, but in the months to come he will be alienated from his closest friends and find himself strapped to a medical gurney, unable to speak.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was Cory Doctorow's first novel, and I read it purely for the author. DisneyWorld has no attraction for me, and that disinterest meant that I didn't actually care what happened in the novel.  Most interesting for me were elements of Doctorow's worldbuilding.  In his future, mental states can be downloaded into computers, and people make backups of themselves frequently. This is not just a precaution against death;  people can effectively erase negative periods of their lives by reverting to an earlier version of themselves.  Bioengineering extends to custom clones, as  teenage girls sport trendy faces, and musicians use augmented bodies (pianists with long fingers) that help them in their craft.  There's also a neural interface that allows people to interact with society's digital layer merely with their heads; one of the first things people do when encountering friends or strangers is to glance  at their "Whuffie",  the reputation system that functions as society's currency. ("Whuffie" is like reddit karma, but you can buy stuff with it.  The Orrville had an episode where the crew visits a planet with this kind of currency. Brief clip here.)

Fans of DisneyWorld may find this far more appealing than I did. His later novels have captivated me in a way that this one didn't even begin to.

Centauri Dawn

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Centauri Dawn
© 2000 Michael Ely
292 pages

Earth was a sad memory for the crew and colonists of the good ship Unity, who fled its radioactive remains in hopes of building a new society near a not-too distant star, Alpha Centauri.  But an unexpected assassination brings the fears of the past alive once again, and when Unity arrives at her target, she no longer lives up to the name. Instead, the people of the dying colony-ship  cling to like-minded ideologues, and the sorry spectacle of human history begans to unfold again, this time on a planet covered in mysterious xenofungus and populated only by mind-destroying worms.

Such is the premise of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a turn-based strategy game that compels a player to pick a faction and see them through to victory. The sequel to  Civilization II, SMAC remains one of the best-critically received PC games of all time -- holding, for instance, the PC Gamer record with a score of 98%.  It was a logical successor to Civ 2, which allowed players a 'peaceful' victory if they built a colonyship and sent it to Alpha Centauri.   While the traditional Civ games have players choose a civ to play as -- the Persians, the Japanese,  the Aztecs, etc --   SMAC's factions were sorted among ideological lines, championing religion, science, capitalism,  miltarism, etc.   Unusually for an open-ended "4X" game like this (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), SMAC  had a plot which would develop as the player played, learning about the planet "Chiron" -- specifically, learning that the planet is alive, with a collective consciousness,  and  that the constant attacks on human outpost by mindworms were a response to the constant terraforming.  The story of Alpha Centauri -- the human in-fighting amid the alien world's exploration -- is presumably the setup for the trilogy of novels written about them. 

This first novel, Centauri Dawn, only covers the ship breaking up into factions, and the first decade of life on the planet as a few of the colony pods find one another and try to maintain some semblance of unity despite tensions over resources.  Not all of the factions feature here, as the first novel focuses on the conflict between the UN Peacekeepers -- the alleged 'government' of all the settlements -- and the Spartans, who are militarists.  The Gaians, who are...tech-hippies, feature, and  the capitalists and religious fundamentalists also make an appearance. Mysteriously absent is the Human Hive,   which  is a totalitarian society with obvious Chinese influences. (They're supposedly based on the Chinese philosophy of Legalism.)   The Hive does appear in the second novel, however.

If you are interested in a storied playthrough of the game, I found a good one on the Let's Play Archive. The player chose the Gaians, who are supposedly the easiest faction.  Also,  just for flavor, I've inserted the Spaceship victory cinematic from Civ 3 below, as well as the intro video for SMAC. Also,  in the last few years another SF 4X game called Beyond Earth was intended as a spiritual successor to SMAC. It wasn't anywhere near as critically acclaimed, but it does have some interesting elements.  Here's a review if you're interested!

Old Man's War

Old Man's War
© 2005 John Scalzi
320 pages

Boot camps on Earth may promise to make a new man out of you, but the intake camps of the Colonial Defense Forces do it for real. At the tender age of seventy-five, John Perry enlisted in the Colonial Defense Forces and disappeared from Earth, never to be seen again.  No knew what happened to CDF enlistees, but on Earth the rumors were pervasive: they can make you young again. Why else would they only recruit 75-year olds?   Perry thought it was a gamble worth taking, and even when he woke up in a new body -- a green one -- it was still better than being hunched over and arthritic. But then the mysteries around the CDF fell away to reveal ugly truths: the universe brims over with intelligent and aggressive species, and all of them are fighting tooth and nail to expand faster than the next guy. Ordinary soldiers stood no chance against the universe of horrors, but auguments -- with increased strength, stamina,  and abilities -- could at least hold their own, especially when coupled with the experience of mature humans transferred into them. Even so,  75% of augments would not survive their term of enlistment.

 Old Man's War is first in a trilogy,  and is somewhat reminiscent of Starship Troopers given the supersoldiers fighting against a galaxy of monsters. The alien creatures vary widely, from slime molds  to biological shredders. The Hork-Bajir would not be out of place here.  Part of the reason so many CDF troops die is that they're in constant use: if humans aren't defending colonies, they're attacking alien colonies or clearing out native species to make room for human colonists.  Can't we all get along?  ...no. The last person to ask that question in the novel got turned into a puddle of goo in an alien church, so...no. It's kill or be killed. The only diplomacy in the novel occurs after a ritual of individual combat designed to see how many questions the winners earn the right to ask.

This is the first Scalzi novel I've not read which is intended to be more serious than funny, and while there are light moments, Old Man's War is chiefly a SF combat thriller.  There are creepier elements to explore, too, like the "Ghost Brigades".   I could see reading more of this series, but I was mostly interested in the idea of transferring consciousness from an aged body into a lab-grown young one. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech the CDF uses is above the heads of our newly-arrived narrator, so we don't really get an inkling as to how it works. Because humans often steal technology from aliens, even the upper echelons of the CDF don't know exactly how things work, and they're not the only ones.  I might continue with this series if the kindle books go on sale, but I mostly read this for the basic ideas of consciousness-transferal. More monster-slaying doesn't strike me as too exciting.

Agent to the Stars

Agent to the Stars
© 1997, 2005 John Scalzi
286 pages

They're heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere.  Extraterrestrials exist, and they've been watching our television.  The good news is they don't hold it against us -- though they don't want to meet any of our politicians.  They've seen the debates.   Who are they? They are the Yherjak, an amiable race of aliens who have the misfortune of looking like giant mounds of snot. They smell like fish. And...they're aware that this will cause a little image problem in a first contact situation.   Obviously, they need a good agent to finesse things -- to maybe use Hollywood to introduce the planet the idea of repulsive-but-friendly aliens.   Such is the setup for Agent to the Stars, a wonderfully funny  light-SF tale that features sarcastic aliens,  talking dogs,  and a little Hollywood drama, including abducted paparazzi.

After reveling in the Star Trek spiff that was Redshirts,  and especially in the codas which so transformed a comic novel into something seriously touching, I looked forward to this on its premise alone. Scalzi doesn't disappoint. This is not 'serious' science fiction, or anything close to it;  our aliens are smelly blobs of goo that have learned everything they know on Earth by watching TV, and their language is laced with culture references and sitcom quips.  Their interactions with humans --  main character Tom Stein, rising talent agent, is not the first -- have helped them put things into perspective, and to realize that  people don't spontaneously have conversations in which they recommend laxatives to one another while watching TV --  but  their fanboy passion for television makes them goofy fun to hang around.

This is not purely a comedic novel; as with Redshirts there are serious moments, developing late in the novel when one character is involved in a serious accident that, tragic as it is, presents an opportunity if the morality of it can be worked through.  Tangentially connected to the main story is Stein's well-meaning attempt to help one of his starlets branch out by landing her a serious role as a Holocaust survivor who later becomes a civil rights activist in the US's turbulent sixties.  The movie is a biopic about a real-world survivor-activist, and her efforts to help people see the essential humanity of one another, looking past differences in appearance and culture, obviously gives the aliens' desire to contact humanity and be received in brotherhood a little more oomph.

That aside, the novel is consistently funny throughout, and I'm going to keep poking around for more by Scalzi.

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema
© 2012 Cory Doctorow
384 pages

All Cecil B. DeVille wanted to do was make movies. He didn't mean to ruin his family's lives or start a revolution. In the not-too-distant future,  consumer electronics have concealed chips which monitor and report web activity, and when that involves streaming or downloading copyrighted material,  the reprisal is extreme: three-time offenders have their household internet connection terminated for a year.  When Cecil's hobby of downloading movies and remixing their scenes to make new stories  catches the attention of the authorities and his home loses connection, the results are devastating:  Cecil's father loses his job and his sister begins sliding into academic failure. Horrified by the repercussions, Cecil flees to the streets, there to befriend eccentrics who have dropped out of society.  Raiding dumpsters for food and living in an abandoned bar,  Cecil finds the knowledge, the tools,  the will, and the friends that he needs to fight back.

At the heart of this teen political thriller is the debate over intellectual property. This is a recurring theme in Doctorow's work, but the center of everything here. In the book's world, the American entertainment/recording industry has essentially captured Parliament:  both of the major party-alliances pass whatever bill it urges.  While attending an illicit screening of remix films,  Cecil learns that a bill is heading toward Parliament which will allow for the incarceration of anyone -- even minors -- who breach very broadly-defined copyright laws.  Even excerpting scenes for use in a YouTube movie review could land a kid in serious jail time.   Armed with a self-built laptop sans corporate spyware, Cecil and friends launch an agitation campaign to spread the word and hopefully force an upset.   As with Little Brother,  Doctorow uses the novel to debate an issue.  Doctorow's publication history indicates that while he's  a proponent of looser copyright laws,  there are limits to how far that can be taken.  Here,  the moments of nuance as  other characters challenge Cecil's  presumptions are overshadowed by the flagrant bullying of the entertainment industry, who divide their time between creating garbage films and  bankrupting or jailing kids.

I found Pirate Cinema interesting from every angle;  from  Cecil's  obsessive interest in producing films by creatively remixing scenes from one particular actor's vast corpus of works, to his exploration of an illicit society --  living in abandoned buildings, exploring underground London and looking for places to host film screenings,   finding technological workarounds to counter technological surveillance, and  of course the debate itself.  Because his story is set in London, Doctorow also unleashes the full power of British English.   Doctorow's other novels set in America were written or edited so well to match an American voice that the hurricane of British lingo took me by surprise. I'd be really curious about a Brit's perspective, whether his use of slang flows well or if its just a little much.  (Imagine a narrator who sounds like Eggsy from Kingsman: The Secret Service, prior to  wearing suits and speaking RP.)  My used copy of the book is  a discard from a Canadian library, though, so there may be an American edition out there that refers to dumpsters and drugs instead of skips and sugar.

Although part of the novel are unrealistic -- the lack of dangerous and seriously disturbed people among the homeless who Cecil meets, for instance,  and the over-the-top villainy --  I found Pirate Cinema both clever and fun. Intellectual property and copyright issues are an on-going issue as we find ourselves more and more immersed in an ocean of content.  What makes this novel especially interesting is that people really do edit films the way Doctorow describes; I've seen trailers made for movies that don't exist (Titanic 2: Jack's Back) ,witnessed the crew of Deep Space Nine react to Star Trek 2009, (they disapproved), and watched 'movies' that used footage from video-games, sometimes edited or framed to make it more cinematic.  Improvisation with already-existing materials is the basis of culture and innovation: even  at a professional level. I can't help but think of John Carmack of ID Software  creating a way to have side-scrolling PC games by using the first level of Mario as his subject.   Cecil's is a case that's more troublesome: while he IS using footage in original ways, the film itself is someone else's product, and it cost them to produce it. 

Artemis

Artemis
© 2017 Andy Weir
320 pages

"This is a results-oriented profession. The moon's a mean old bitch. She doesn't care why your suit fails. She just kills you when it does."

Jazz Bashara only wanted to engage in a little industrial sabotage to make a quick buck. She didn't intend to poison her entire hometown.  But that's the Moon for ya.    Andy Weir's potent mix of hard science, space exploration, and a smart-aleck central character make a return with Artemis,  in which a perfectly innocent criminal enterprise leads to a mob war. A heist novel in space,  Artemis'  most attractive element is right there in the title: the city of Artemis,  whose technical designs and economy Weir planned out before he wrote the novel.  Artemis is an intriguing look what an established lunar colony might actually look like, and readers explore it through the eyes of a young petty criminal, a woman named Jasmine ("Jazz") Bashara, who knows its systems as well as she knows its underbelly.

Jazz is an interesting character in her own right, an Arabian near-native of the moon.  Artemis restricts immigration by age,  but she arrived at age six with her master-welder father and together they forged a new life for themselves. Although Jazz didn't follow in her father's footsteps -- she accidentally destroyed his shop and livelihood, long story  -- her welding background proves useful when she escalates from smuggling to sabotage. The book's plot is inseparable from science and technical reality,   but Weir also explore social structures.  There's no police force or prisons,  just a constable, but  ne'er do wells do meet retaliatory justice: a pedophile might be beaten by a crowd of incensed parents, for instance, or a wife-beater might have every blow inflicted on his wife imposed on him by the constable. Although I doubt I'll see a lunar colony in my lifetime,  the amount of imaginative and detailed knowledge that went into Artemis made it a fascinating place to explore and accidentally cripple.

Readers of both novels may grouse that Jazz sounds a little too much like Mark Watney.   That's actually fine by me, because they're both amusing to spend time with. Besides, Jazz moved to a frontier town when she was six,  she was raised by a single father and spent her youth working with him in his welding shop, and all of her friends are working-class guys.  Is it really that shocking that she sounds like a guy?

I enjoyed Artemis completely, and if they make a movie of it  I'll be there when it opens.

Related:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein.  Another lunar-colony story, this one inspired by the American revolution.
The Martian, Andy Weir.  A favorite read from 2014.

Machine Man

Machine Man
© 2009 Max Barry
277 pages

Who knew crushing your limbs in the industrial machinery at work could be so addictive?  When Charlie Neumann accidentally crushed his leg in a fit of absentmindedness and was fitted with state-of-the-art prosthesis, he could only stare in dismay. This was state of the art?  Combing his engineering mind, his company's resources, and his ability to fixate on a project beyond all reason, Neumann promptly built a better leg. Then, realizing it would work better as a pair, he decided to recreate his accident and crush the other leg.  When his employer, a research-and-production firm caught on, they didn't fire him and sue him for abusing his insurance and using company materials to make himself a pair of super-legs. Instead, they promoted him.   This has potential, they said. An entire product line. Better Legs! Better Skin! Better Eyes!   We can rebuild him, WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!

Too bad they were kind of evil.  Machine Man is the fourth book by satirist Max Barry, who has previously had fun with novels mocking corporate culture and advertising.  Machine Man definitely has humor, primarily in its main characters' utter obliviousness to social cues and his often deadpan responses,  but it's not absurdist fiction like that that PG Wodehouse. Instead the humor softens what otherwise might be a somewhat horrifying tale of a man who serially butchers himself, awakening the interest in a morally dubious company and empowering them to get even more dubious. Things get rather out of end, with one of the endgame chapters involving a fight to the death between two cyborgs, both of whom are increasingly schizophrenic.  One character winds up as a brain-in-a-box, which takes us to "I have no mouth and I must scream" territory.  While I'm labeling this science fiction, given the contents and transhumanist interest,   I don't know if the nerve interfaces mentioned here were based on any then-current research;  the first that I know of was announced in 2016.

All in all,  I enjoyed this. Of course, I like the author -- I've read most of his previous novels, albiet ten years ago.  I have a certain fascination with the idea of 'augmented humanity', even as most of my being recoils at the idea of it. Barry's combination of humor, emotional drama, and the able use of the company as an amiable villain made it a swift and engaging read. 

Related:
Latest developments in prosthetics, from The Independent. 

Reads to Reels: Ready Player One

The Redbox technician hadn't long placed copies of Ready Player One in my local machine before I eagerly rented one. I experienced the  book a few weeks back, enthralled by the story and Wil Wheaton's delivery of it,  and so launched into this with a stupid grin on my face as the move rolled to Van Halen's "Jump". It didn't take me long to realize this wasn't the story I'd  experienced, but knowing that adjustments have to made for the sake of different mediums, I  resolved to enjoy it nontheless. 

  As a movie it's a perfectly fun action-adventure thriller with a bounty of pop-culture references.  The acting is fine, and the production seamessly integrates live-action scenes and characters with pure-CGI ones, since the characters themselves spend most of their time within a computer-generated gameworld called the Oasis.  For those who haven't read the book,  Ready Player One is set in the near fuure in which everything has gotten worse: poverty, unemployment, the environment, pick your poison. What has improved is massively multiplayer online games, and the only one that matters is the Oasis.  There players can appear  however they like, and visit planet after planet of adventures and activities.   Aside from eating, sleeping, and excretion, everything is done in the Oasis.     When the creator of the Oasis dies, his will invites the entire world to a treasure hunt. He's hidden an Easter egg somewhere in the Oasis,  accessible only to those who find three concealed keys guarded by riddles and challenges.  The reward? Control of the Oasis and trillions of dollars.  Not bad.

While I'm actively resisting the urge to compare the movie too much for the book,  that is in fact the whole purpose of Reads to Reels: to comment both on adaptions' worth in themselves and as re-tellings of literary originals.  The broad outline of the RPO novel and movie are the same, as are its characters -- but the story told is much different. The movie opens with a drag race,  something oddly out of place in the novel's  fantasy-questing theme. The entire atmosphere of the book -- the massive revival of eighties culture inspired by global study of Halliday's own fixation on his childhood -- just isn't there.  Those who watch the movie without reading the book will probably find the eighties soundtrack a little odd, because there's nothing to explain it.

In fairness to the movie, though, the author helped with this screenplay and the mediums of book and cinema have different demands. A big-budget production couldn't have a plot with a lot of pondering over intricate riddles and fooling with text-based games, let alone a sequence where a character has to log into a TRS-180 and play Zork. It's a lot easier to sell a race laden with T-Rex and King Kong as obstacles instead of an eight-bit arcade game as the challenge, I get it.  Ditto for the emphasis on action drama (the lead characters are in mortal peril for pretty much the entire movie), instead of Parzival's  relationships with his friends, the turmoil their bonds undergo, and the growing realization that a planet lost in the Oasis is just..wrong.  Instead we get action-adventure and then we're hit with the reality/unreality moral  with all the subtly of a baseball bat.

While Ready Player One is a fun action movie, one I wouldn't mind watching again,  it doesn't succeed as an adaptation of the original for me.

On a side note,  I was amused that my mental image of the villain, casting him as Ben Mendelsohn, proved to be on the nose, as he appears here as the big bad. (I was mostly inspired by his performance in The Dark Knight Rises.) I didn't care for the characters in-game avatars, particularly Art3mis, but that's subjective. I imagined her as the hero of Dungeon Siege: 

 

 The producers went a...different direction. 

 That's not a cartoon of the character, that's how the character actually looks  Kind of like a cat.