Reading:

I know, I'm out of order. I have two previously-read, and very good, books to review before I get up to this one. But who knew, except me? Who cares?¹
Well I can't resist. Eastern Standard Tribe deserves the following rather unprofessional review:

Fuck. Ing. Awe. Some.

Truly. It's really really good. I enjoyed the ubiquitous comms (which are mobile phone, handheld computer, net connection, bank card and everything else all rolled into one – Greg Egan had similar ones in everyone's hands way back when, and I've wanted one ever since)…
I like the way so much of the momentum is kept up through conversation, when most idea-driven sf can fall down on the dialogue…
I really enjoyed the dual-stranded plotting: there's a first-person present tense strand and a third-person past tense one. Even though the present tense narrative deliberately undercuts any suspense from the past tense one (we already know what's going to happen), the narrative never loses momentum, and the present tense plot moves forward in a satisfyingly odd and unpredictable manner.
Totally recommended for the filesharing/blog generation. An absolute delight.

And as a bonus: now go read a wonderful short story of Cory's at the Fortean Bureau ("A magazine of speculative fiction): Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar), which has both a musical and an Australian connection of sorts. Post-apocalyptic craziness as only Cory can do it…
(Speaking of short stories, 2/3 of the stories in his excellent A Place So Foreign and Eight More collection can be downloaded for free here. The Jewish superman story is particularly cool…

¹ The reason I'm so strict with myself is that I have a fear that if I just jump to the most recent book, vivid in my memory, then I will no longer have any motivation to review the previous ones, and some poor sod will be left unreviewed in Stumblings. A woeful fate indeed.

Alastair Reynolds, I have to admit right away, is one of those sf authors with whom I correspond (being a good fanboy), and indeed I recently received an email from Al enquiring about certain properties of the double bass, an instrument which seems to play a bit part in his next novel. He thought that as I was a string player I might have some idea; exciting – I shall be appearing the acknowledgements of said novel, Century Rain, which sounds like it'll be wonderful.

Absolution Gap closes, for now, the sequence of novels set in the Revelation Space universe. Readers of Interzone perhaps, or of Gardner Dozois' Best New SF collections, may be aware that this universe has a very definite cap to it via the novella "Galactic North", in which rogue self-replicating terraforming machines eventually dismantle and reconstruct the entire galaxy, in effect turning it all green (and uninhabitable, mind you)… Fun! This is rather slyly alluded to in Absolution Gap (When I mentioned my delight at this, Al wrote: "Thanks – I was very keen to keep consistency with GN, even if only about 3 people on the entire planet even realise.")

Absolution Gap exhibits all of Reynolds' favourite themes: way-out physics (Reynolds is an astrophysicist himself); cosmic battles; very warped characters attempting to find peace with their pasts (or not, as the case may be); cognitive science; nearly-incomprehensible alien artefacts; faith-inducing viruses; plot strands separated by time, converging in the end with slippages in personal identity… It's all here.
And mostly it works beautifully as always. There are some stunning creations, such as the glass-blower whose creations are so fragile that they can only survive in zero-gravity, and even transporting them from their place of origin can destroy them.

There are initially three strands: the first takes off from where Redemption Ark finished, with Clavain, Scorpio and co on the Pattern Juggler world with Captain Brannigan's transformed spaceship Nostalgia For Infinity (was ever a spaceship better named?) growing spookier by the second, while in the skies above various human factions fight an increasingly abstruse space battle. [Let me point out now that despite the delights of the two relatively-independent other strands, there's no point reading this book if you haven't read Revelation Space and Redemption Ark at least... So, apologies if all these references are arcane and unfamiliar - just go read his other stuff! Chasm City isn't so essential here, but it's a brilliant novel all the same...]
In the second, a man named Quaiche, infected with a virus that tries to force a religious impulse on him in times of stress, works for a group of very twisted Ultras who seem to be taking Goth culture to its natural cyborgised extreme. Quaiche has a traumatic experience on a mysterious world, which, followed by a seemingly miraculous event, pushes him (literally and metaphorically) into a chasm from which he can no longer escape his faith virus's hold.
Meanwhile, in the third strand an extremely resourceful teenage girl called Rashmika Els, living on a moon called Hela, finds herself drawn to run away from her parents' village (well, it's sort of a village) and make her way to the astounding procession of cathedrals that endlessly circles the world. She goes ostensibly to find out what happened to her brother, but it doesn't take long for us to figure out more is afoot, especially regarding Rashmika's obsession with the Scuttlers, a race long extinct (exterminated?) on Hela. Rashmika is a delightful creation, a bit like one of Terry Pratchett's little girl characters, and she is a great relief next to the almost infinite cruelty of Skade, who makes a final and enormously tramatic reappearance in the first storyline.

The way Rashmika's and Quaiche's strands come together, and eventually the third one too, is as effective and satisfying as Chasm City's craftsmanship. Along the way acts of inhuman torture and savagery sit next to touching human stories, an intriguing perspective on the world of Hela is created for us, and the way rumour and news spreads in a huge but relativistic universe is explored. However, something just doesn't seem to sit right with the novel as a conclusion to the Inhibitors storyline. Humanity, it seems, is being judged, and the events on Hela that caused Quaiche's miracle are part of it. But perhaps due to the exigencies of the multi-stranded plot, too much of the mystery is kept in the shadows (so to speak) for too long, and not enough foreshadowing is made of the other agency apparently involved (via the Remontoire/Clavain/Scorpio/etc strand). Everything ends up being resolved, as this guy puts it, "in like literally the last 3 pages".
The blurb tells us that "…a dark and unsettling truth becomes apparent: to beat one enemy, it may be necessary to forge an alliance with something much, much worse…" But other than very vague hints at genocides on all parts, little is revealed about the various shadowy alien species involved in battling or hiding from the Inhibitor threat. It remains unclear by the end, it seems to me, why the particular choice that is made is the right one. Perhaps Reynolds' point is that our destiny is dependent, right down to the details, upon contingency. That seems to be the message of "Galactic North" too, and if so, then fair enough. I was left more than a little mystified though.

In the same email quoted above, Al acknowledged that I'm not the only one to be unconvinced by the ending, but people "differ as to whether the rest of the book is adequate compensation or not – some feel it is, some (unfortunately) feel it isn't." Well, I certainly feel that there is plenty in this book to justify the overarching storyline's discomfiting conclusion. There is a lot of beautiful metaphorical imagery that enriches the various plots points along the way, and Reynolds' skill with characterisation grows better with every book.
I have to recommend the two-novella collection Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days though. I have both separately; "Diamond Dogs" describes the bizarre and very disturbing exploration of a mysterious alien artefact, and connects with the rest of the Revelation Space universe in surprising ways (there's a throwaway line about it in one of the last two novels – I wish I remember where!) "Turquoise Days" may be my favourite Reynolds work yet, an elegiac tale of a Pattern Juggler world where one of the minds dissolved in the sea may be too dangerous to be allowed to remain…
Al Reynolds remains one of the most exciting sf novelists around, and I for one can't wait for Century Rain (ostensibly coming out in October this year!)

Wow. Steve Aylett is an evil genius, and he's been here under my nose all along. How did I miss him until recently? The charming Thomas Marchbank @ Allen & Unwin told me I'd like him, and how right he was! I have a feeling nothing else will quite live up to Slaughtermatic, although I'm going to dive into the short stories of Toxicology soon, so we'll see! I've since read The Crime Studio and Atom as well, both of which were fun, but Slaughtermatic is something else again. The rapid-fire riffs on Borgesian themes, the insanely surreal weaponry, the warped English take on American crime fiction (Aylett's biography claims that "if he were any more English he'd be dead"), the cyberpunk aesthetic… it's all too much. Just about every page has some throwaway line that could have an entire comic sf novel made out of it; fascinating characters are created and then disposed of; Aylett creates a temporal paradox with charming disregard for logic, except that the characters have deep philosophical discussions about it (not to mention discussing the economics of robbing a bank while doing so… and on it goes).
It's postmodernism without the stupid bits. It's a cyberpunk Terry Pratchett with all dials turned up to 11 – indeed it revels in just that kind of mixed metaphor, which it takes so seriously that you're swept along in its upside-down and inside-out logic.

Oh. You want to know something about the book? Goodness, how demanding! Well, um, Beerlight is this city where basically all the residents are criminals (or want to be – it's sortof like a criminals' Hollywood). The worst crims are the cops, of course. (All the Ayletts I've read so far are Beerlight books.)
Dante Cubit stages a bank heist, using time travel to get out before the alarms go off. It turns out his real reason for robbing the bank is to get hold of a lost book by Eddie Gamete, and many of Slaughtermatic's joys revolve around the potted descriptions of Gamete's fiction: "Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort…"
Of Gamete, we are told: "The thinking man's Camus, he achieved in his first draft what others attained by years of overwriting."
"In Trash Tango the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo". Whereas The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel (the book Dante seeks) is a kind of fractal novel which apparently no person can read and live. Gamete is surely the greatest fictional author since Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, but Aylett is too clever not to play on Borges' fake fictions and Georges Perec's playful surreality while he's at it.

I should've known that Paul di Filippo was right when I read his review of this ages ago, but I just noted Aylett's name down and forgot about it. I'm so glad I finally picked this one up at Berkelows' big sale (whenever it was…) You just have to read this. You really have no choice.

It's really quite astounding how long it's taken me to get around to reading Linda Nagata. Simply the idea of what she wrote, and some hearty recommendation from Al Reynolds made me decide to go and find all her novels, and it was quite a job tracking down the early ones from Bantam Spectra (only released in the US, with those traditionally horrible US mass market paperback covers *sigh*).

I've just started her second novel, and so it's about time I got around to reviewing her first! I'm so far behind *sob*¹
I was completely bowled over by this novel. Nagata's vision of a not-that-near-but-not-far-future world is so detailed and confident that it's hard to believe it's a first novel. The combination of cyberpunk, bio- and nanotech with philosophical and political speculation is an absolute joy to read. The Bohr Maker of the title is a nanotech mod that gives its user the power to create more Makers, control the emotions of nearby humans, and rewrite their own genetic code: it is imbued with the biotechnological knowledge of its creator, Leander Bohr. Nikko Jiang-Tibayan is a man who has been modified (from birth) to survive in outer space, but he has a hard-coded life-span in his DNA. With only a few weeks to live, he is desparately seeking the Bohr Maker.
But this Maker is banned by the Commonwealth, and when it is smuggled out of containment by one of the beautifully flawed supporting characters, it ends up accidentally being injected into a poverty-stricken Indian prostitute named Phousita. The descriptions of the slums of her world are striking; Sunda exists out of the Commonwealth's strict control of biotech, and horrifically transformed victims of rogue nanotech beg on the streets, while the massed poor subsist (unaware) on the waste from cleaning nanotechnology.

The Bohr Maker is crammed full of delightful supporting characters (such as slum doctor Zeke Choy). The character of Kirstin Adair, Chief of the Commonwealth Police, is a little overdone – she's too much the manipulative ice queen, rabidly anti-biotech. But she's about the only flaw in this book (a couple of unconvincing plot points aside), and there's so much invention that it doesn't matter.
In every person's head is an atrium, a cyberspatial interface but also literally a virtual sitting-room where they can receive guests. One can also send out ghosts, virtual copies of oneself, to go data-mining or go on virtual errands, and these ghosts can ride in someone else's atrium, piggybacking off their sense-data. The ghosts can then be reintegrated on their return (a concept that turns up in the later Accelerando stories of Charlie Stross²). Indeed, some atria can be used to enslave the possessor, an experience that has left one of Phousita's companions terribly scarred.

There's much more to this book, and it's a major tragedy that it, along with the next two of Nagata's nanotech novels, is out of print and very hard to come by. I strongly recommend anyone who's interested in cutting-edge science fiction to check Nagata out. Greg Egan and Bruce Sterling are obvious points of comparison/influences, and she's easily up there with contemporaries like Charlie Stross and Alastair Reynolds – not to mention fellow Hawaiian nanotech visionary Kathleen Ann Goonan.

¹Of course I am beholden of nobody except myself to review everything I read, but I still feel a strange obligation…
²Cue obligatory gloat: I've read 'em all now, thanks to Charlie's generosity. The rest of you rabble will have to wait for the final two in Asimov's later this year, or for the highly-anticipated and updated Accelerando fix-up novel in 2005 – which will blow everything else out of the water for years to come. You heard it here (not that I am alone in hyping the guy)!

Listening:

• September 2011
• February 2011
• May 2010
• April 2010
• February 2010
• April 2009
• January 2009
• November 2008
• October 2008
• July 2008
• May 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005
• November 2005
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• July 2005
• June 2005
• April 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• September 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• May 2004
• April 2004
• March 2004
• February 2004
• January 2004
• December 2003
• November 2003
• October 2003
• September 2003
• August 2003
• July 2003
• June 2003
• May 2003
• April 2003
• March 2003
• February 2003
• January 2003
• December 2002
• November 2002
• October 2002
• September 2002
• August 2002
• July 2002
• February 2002
• January 2002
• November 2001
• October 2001
• September 2001
• July 2001
• February 2001
• January 2001
• December 2000
• November 2000
• October 2000
• August 2000
• July 2000
• June 2000