Starship Troopers
This is perhaps the most celebrated of Heinlein’s ‘juvenile’ novels.
Category: Fiction
spicy wings?
Someone Comes To Town Someone Leaves Town
I found a copy of the ebook of this on an old thumb drive.
A very strange and oddly moving book this.
The story opens with a man refurbishing an old house in Toronto. Somehow it leads to a falling out with one of his neighbours, a plan to create an open access wifi mesh network and the stirring up of old secrets.
The book felt, real, somehow. For it’s weirdness and the strangeness of it’s characters.
I would recommend this book in it’s free ebook state without hesitation as it’s definitely worth the read.
pouch?
Friday
Oh dear, Oh dear. Going by the reviews blurbed on the cover of the book, this was considered at one point to be Heinlein’s last great book.
For the record this book is a big old pile of manure that I couldn’t wait to be done with.
Friday is a ‘combat courier’, the kind you turn to when your delivery must absolutely get through. She’s also an artificial artefact, a genetically manipulated superhuman in a world where prejudice is rife and her kind have no rights.
The book follows her on a couple of missions and through an incident called ‘Red Thursday’. It also follows her obsessive need for family and love through several groups of people.
Friday is a typical late Heinlein character – practically flawless and her main flaw is in her total humility.
Unfortunately she’s just not a very sympathetic character and Heinlein’s quirks have gotten real old by this point in his career.
If I hadn’t already read ‘I Will Fear No Evil’ and ‘To Sail Beyond The Sunset’ I would have classed this as his worst book.
It’s such a pity that so many of the genuinely great science fiction authors started produced self-indulgent crap the second they’re successful enough to overrule their editor.
The only reason to read this is for Heinlein completism or for an idea of the influences behind Charles Stross’ upcoming Saturn’s Children..
flip?
Bellwether
This is only the second Connie Willis book I’ve read. Like that book this is an excellent read.
Sandra Foster is a sociological researcher at a privately funded institution looking into fads and how they start, who is bought into contact with a researcher into Chaos Theory called Bennett O’Reilly after a parcel is delivered wrongly to her lab.
Not a book of great events or battles, this instead is all about the characters and the way they interact, the way they see the world and the consequences of those actions.
This book is rather lovely, with a lot of wit and good insight to the human condition and particularly good at skewering the ridiculousness of bureaucracy.
I particularly loved the breakdowns of various fads histories delivered at the start of every chapter.
I would recommend this book to pretty much anybody. I won’t guarantee that you’ll like it, but those that do will fall totally in love with it..
restless?
Search The Sky
Pohl and Kornbluth wrote some magnificent science fiction together. Indeed I regard The Space Merchants as one of my favourite science fiction books. However this particular title, even after a 1985 update, is rather dated.
The plot is straightforward enough, a young man on a colony world becomes disenchanted with the ‘decay’ he can see around him everywhere. As a result he is entrusted with access to a secret faster than light ship to find out “What has gone wrong with mankind and why?”.
This journey takes in several worlds, where he gets into trouble and rescues others in trouble.
The crux of the story is based upon some shonky equation that blames lack of genetic diversity for the woes of the worlds.
Plus points are the excellent way they keep the plot moving forward and the relative brevity of the book compared to modern titles because this book would have seriously sucked at greater length.
The negatives are cardboard characters, trite world building and a sense that this would have been better off stuck back in the 50’s.
I would only recommend this particular title to those interested in the work of Pohl & Kornbluth or in the mood for some quick old school sci-fi.
leuchars?
The Execution Channel
MacLeod tries something new with this near-future thriller. Set in a world with rampant terrorism (including nuclear attacks) and American offensives throughout Central Asia.
Principally told through the eyes of James Travis, a middle aged IT professional with incriminating links to a foreign power, and his daughter Roisin who’s a peace protester camped outside RAF Leuchars (now a USAF base in all but name).
Things kick off when Roisin photographs something unusual on the base just before an explosion wipes the base out. At the same time James’ cover is blown.
Everything gets murky and mucky from there on in as politics and power come to bear.
It’s a world where disinformation on the net is co-ordinated by governments, manipulating soldier’s blogs and feeding stories to bloggers with strong enough a reputation in order to manipulate public perception.
It is, to tell the truth, full of interesting ideas but ultimately falls of being an exceptional piece of work as the story never feels like it pulls together to give a really powerful payoff. Also the only character I thought was anywhere near nuanced enough to be interesting was the daughter and even she seemed a touch on the underwritten side at times.
I suppose I sound a bit disappointed with this, but please don’t get me wrong it’s a pretty strong read – it just could have been extraordinary.
deil?
The Sky Road
The final Fall Revolution book.
surrender?
The Android’s Dream
This started off rather slow, but built a really good head of steam and I ended up really enjoying and liking the main characters rather a lot.
dissembler?
The Star Fraction
A re-read of the first Fall Revolution book
true knowledge?
The Cassini Division
Third Fall Revolution novel is, for me, the best of the series so far. Following on from the events of the end of The Stone Canal we find ourselves back in the solar system, and at the beginning of the book, back on Earth.
Ellen May Ngwethu is a member of the Cassini Division, an elite (if such a thing can exist in the socialist anarchy of the Solar Union) force detailed with the task of controlling the threat posed by the post-human intelligences that stayed behind at Jupiter.
She’s been tasked with finding the man that came up with the physics that allowed the creation of the wormhole, so that a way through to New Mars can be found in order to assess if there’s any threat from the stored post-human intelligences that the Jay-Dub copy of Jon Wilde told them about.
A really enjoyable read with some excellent characters and SF ideas.
Highly recommended.