Lexicon, by Max Barry

You aren’t you, you know. You are a type to be identified, evaluated, measured, sorted, and slotted in with everyone else your type. It’s just a way for businesses, political parties, and non-profits of finding the people most responsive to their message, right? But what if that type isn’t the accretion of your life’s experiences, your current situation, your relationships–in other words, you–but a deep-seated biologically programmed identity vulnerable to direct manipulation? And what if there were people dedicated to learning specific words and sounds that turn the key to your identity and make you want to obey them? Enter the poets.

Barry, whose interest in language and manipulation runs through books such as Jennifer Government and Company, takes a direct run at the topic in this complex thriller. He posits an organization dedicated to exploring ways to control the nearly 300 personality types they’ve identified. Potential students are recruited and tested, and those that pass enter a rigorous and disturbingly competitive education program on their way to analyzing personality types, running experiments on them, and providing the sanitized results to those who will use them in some kind of marketplace. Those who rise to the top of this select group become poets, able to utter a series of nonsense syllables that make the hearer suggestible. To what? In the course of the story, to involuntary sex, giving away money and cars, even committing murder and mayhem, with the implication that these are long-standing and frequently used methods that reach to all levels of society. Those poets are themselves rebranded with the names of real poets, which is why Tom Eliot and Virginia Woolf are playing cat-and-mouse from Australia to Washington, DC. Woolf is a rogue poet capable of suborning even the most experienced of the organization, and Eliot wants to stop her before she executes a horrific plan.

Barry structures the story with intertwined past-and-present narratives. We learn about street kid Emily’s recruitment and training into the organization, and the colossal mistake she makes when she’s sent to Broken Hill, Australia as punishment for another major mistake (A word of warning to the actual Broken Hill Chamber of Commerce: Barry makes it sound like the place where they recruit garbage men for the last stop on the road to the back-of-beyond; it sounds like a cool place in real life). In the present storyline, Eliot violently kidnaps an innocent man from the airport and dodges pursuers on a nonstop quest to find out why the man has been targeted by opposing poets. As the storylines begin to merge, we slowly come to understand why the factions have moved into open warfare with each other.

Barry departs from the cynical humor of his earlier work as he creates this speculative look at power and language. The real tension in his ideas is that the ongoing quest to motivate (command?) masses of people may actually succeed by reducing that mass to precisely defined individuals. If there is humor, it is found in occasional side notes from chat room comments on erroneous news stories which come off as conspiracy theories but are closer to the truth than the commenters know. He also takes those ordinary Website quizzes and polls and gives them a more sinister purpose. I’ll certainly look twice at those ‘recruiting for psychology experiments’ posters and ‘take this online quiz to discover your true self’ with a little more skepticism than I have in the past.

(Lexicon isn’t in the WRL catalog yet, but the link will be added here when the library receives it.)

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The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Blister rust. Cibiscosis. Genehack weevil. Plant and human diseases mutate quickly in the 23rd century, where genehacking by the powerful calorie companies runs the economy. Staying ahead of the plagues can cause otherwise honorable people to justify acts they would never believe they were capable of committing. Major cities, including New York and Mumbai, were drowned as the planet heated; the capital city in Thailand is protected by levees and pumps. Fossil fuels were mostly spent out generations ago. Most power is now human- or beast-created and stored in springs; computers are driven by treadle; radios are hand-cranked. Bicycles, ships, and dirigibles provide transportation.

Anderson Lake manages the SpringLife kink-spring factory in the capital city of Thailand. Megadonts, huge beasts of burden that have been genehacked from elephants, power the factory. SpringLife kink-springs, when finally manufactured, should hold and disperse many more joules than regular springs. This huge factory, with its workers, its megadonts and their handlers, is failing, though Anderson keeps it running. It’s a cover for his real purpose in Thailand. He works covertly for AgriGen, a calorie company based in Des Moines. He’s in Thailand to figure out how the kingdom is growing disease-resistant crops independently of the calorie companies. Potatoes, tobacco, and other nightshades flourish in the markets in Thailand—how can that be when most natural plants succumb to the diseases that thrive and mutate in the age of genetically modified produce of AgriGen, PurCal, RedStar, U Texas and other calorie companies?

Emiko is a windup girl—one of the New People—a genetically modified humanoid “born” in a crèche in Japan and bred to serve her master. She began her life as a kind of secretary for her owner, Gendo-sama, but after he brought her to Thailand on a business trip, he discarded her; dirigible fare back to Japan is exorbitant and Gendo-sama, who had once told Emiko she was beautiful and perfect, found it more economical to simply purchase a newer model once he got back to Japan. As an unnatural species, Emiko is illegal in Thailand, but Raleigh, her new owner, pays bribes to the Environment Ministry to keep her in his club.  She earns her keep as an entertainer in a sexually humiliating show for the pleasure of the patrons of the club. For the most part, Emiko can blend in with humans, though her engineered stutter-stop motions give her away, and her specifically designed small pore structure, fine in cooler Japan, causes her to overheat in Thailand.

When Anderson meets Emiko, Emiko reveals a vital clue to him about the plague-resistant foods, and he tells her something that changes her life forever—and ultimately leads to a rebalancing of power between the Thai government and the calorie companies.

Anderson and Emiko are just two of the many complex characters in the richly-developed Thai kingdom of the future that Bacigalupi has created. Anderson’s assistant, Hock Seng, a “yellow card” refugee from an environmental disaster in Malaysia, has plans and secrets of his own. The head of the White Shirts, the Environment Ministry enforcers, Jaidee Rojjanasukchai and his lieutenant, the unsmiling Kanya Chirathivat, play their parts in this dense and detailed world. Trust and loyalty, kamma or karma, love, regret, and identity are themes that run throughout the novel. Religious beliefs and practices—Christian and Buddhist—have evolved also with the changing environment. The world described in The Windup Girl seems frighteningly possible as we ignore environmental concerns and allow corporations to patent seeds and genes.

The Windup Girl is novel that can be read multiple times without losing its surprises. It’s one of the best novels I have read in many years. It tied with China Miéville’s The City & the City (also a great novel) for the 2010 Hugo Award for best novel.

Check the WRL catalog for The Windup Girl.

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Saga, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

A vicious intergalactic war rages on in this epic fantasy vs. sci-fi standoff. The inhabitants of Landfall, the largest planet in the galaxy, bear vestigial wings and are technologically advanced. They have forever been in conflict with the population of Wreath, Landfall’s moon, who have horns like sheep and a mastery of magic. Each side recruits other planets and races to join their side in the battle, constantly expanding the battlefield throughout the universe.

Alana was a Landfall soldier, sent to guard prisoners on the distant planet of Cleave. Marko was a foot solider for Wreath, but surrendered as a conscientious objector and was sent to Cleave. Within twelve hours of meeting each other, Alana and Marko flee together. Their union produces a daughter named Hazel, who serves as occasional narrator to the story, and has both wings and horns.

Treachery such as theirs can’t go unpunished, and soon both sides are tracking the new parents, who want nothing more than a peaceful place to raise their child. The fragility of the new life they have created strengthens their resolve to, somehow, survive. Landfall sends Prince Robot IV, a humanoid with a television set for a head, to bring them to justice while the Wreath military hires a freelance bounty hunter named The Will. For reasons yet unknown, the Wreath side wants Hazel brought back alive. Another bounty hunter, a former lover of The Will, is also sent by the Wreath forces to track down Alana and Marco. Prince Robot IV and The Will are soon at odds, with The Will swearing to destroy his blue-blooded nemesis.

The writing and the artwork for this series successfully contrast the tenderness and intimacy between the parents against the violence of the worlds around them. There are a lot of ideas introduced in this first volume, which can be tricky to maintain, but Brian K. Vaughan is an experienced writer and this volume is a promising beginning. Fiona Staples’s artwork is simple yet striking, and she manages to make several different, distinct alien worlds, bathing the images in contrasting teals and oranges and greens. Recommended for fantasy and science fiction readers, and anyone who enjoys an against-the-odds romance.

Check the WRL catalog for Saga.

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ABBC 2012: Speculative Fiction

This post concludes an unusual week for Blogging for a Good Book. Instead of our usual fare of one great review a day, this week we’re exploring the results of the 2012 ABBC: the All-the-Best-Books Compilation. It’s a spreadsheet that tabulates all the votes from dozens of best-of-the-year lists and awards. You can download the first edition from this earlier post or come back to BFGB in the next few weeks to get further editions as we compile even more lists into the spreadsheet.

Today, we’ll look at the most frequently recognized titles in speculative fiction: fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The health of these genres is indicated by the number of different titles that have received best-of votes to date: 242. There are some great books here, although I feel the need to preface the list with this comment: speculative fiction marketed as mainstream literary fiction often rises to the top of the best-of-the-year lists because mainstream reviewers won’t give the same level of consideration to titles published by genre presses. If you love the mainstream of fantasy and SF publishing, not its haughtier cousin, download the full ABBC and look a little further down on the list.

With 17 mentions to date, the first title on the speculative list is Karen Thompson Walker’s debut, The Age of Miracles. The setting is a very near apocalyptic future where the rotation of the earth has begun to slow, but the subject matter is coming of age for 11-year-old Julia and the tribulations of her California family. Melissa reviewed this book for us at BFGB back in October and found the tale of how life goes on, even in the face of the end, equally redeeming and disturbing. As the cycle of a day slowly increases from 24 to over 72 hours, Walker does a good job of capturing the sense of loneliness, the increasing reflection of her narrator, and the discoveries and suffering of a life that’s coming to an end just as it reaches the brink of adult awareness.

I’m currently reading one of the titles in a tie for second, at 11 mentions. Alif the Unseen, the debut of G. Willow Wilson,  is about an Arab-Indian hacker in an unnamed Persian Gulf state. This is a place where “hacker” has a different significance, as every computer user, every website is under close supervision by the state, and narrator Alif’s skills aren’t just used for mischief-making and financial gain (although he’s still involved in these aspects), they’re critical to hiding both his own identity and that of his clients, who are tortured and often killed if unmasked. A breakup with an illicit girlfriend leads Alif to create a program that can identify an individual by voice, word choice, keystroke rates, and other factors after he or she has typed only a few sentences. When the state hacks into his computer and takes the program, Alif realizes he has unleashed a Trojan horse that will be turned on the entire hacking community. Add the Alf Yeom, the daytime analog of One Thousand and One Nights; underworld figures that end up being from the world Alif once thought of as mythical; and several mysterious and interesting women, and you get a real winner, a truly original work of speculative fiction.

The other title with 11 mentions is Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, reviewed here by Andrew in July. It’s set in a postapocalyptic world ravaged by flu nine years before. The protagonist is Hig, a pilot who’s trying to maintain a sense of compassion in a world where others are increasingly inured to the suffering of others. Dug in at a Midwestern airport for years with his dog Jasper and one neighbor, the ruthless and cynical Bangley, Hig is going a bit stir crazy. He decides to fly toward the source of a distress signal, trying to help the suffering, but facing dangers at every turn. Andrew liked the immediacy of the first-person narration. Other reviewers note the poetic way in which Heller finds new beginnings even at the end.

In fourth with ten mentions, and also reviewed by Andrew for BFGB, is Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s about web designer, Clay Jannon, who has hit a career slump and in financial peril answers the Help Wanted ad in the window of an odd bookstore. He ends up working the night shift, selling books with languages and letters he doesn’t recognize to a small clientele of  strange customers. He uses his computer skills to create a kind of inventory for the store, and what he discovers in doing so leads him down the proverbial rabbit hole. The results are kind of Haruki Murakami meets Neal Stephenson meets Borges, but perhaps less complex than any of those works, a fantastic bookstore/library adventure with a mystery at its core and lots of references to make us nerdy folk happy.

Rounding out the top 12 in this category are Lydia Netzer’s Shine Shine Shine with eight mentions to date; a four-way tie for 6th at seven mentions between the middle book in Justin Cronin’s trilogy The Twelve, Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, Daniel O’ Malley’s The Rook, and John Scalzi’s Redshirts; and a three-way tie for 10th at six mentions between Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night, N. K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312.

I’ll summarize other categories of the ABBC — literary fiction, historical fiction, narrative nonfiction, and biographies and memoirs — at my other blogging home, Book Group Buzz, in upcoming weeks. Come back to us at Blogging for a Good Book to get further editions of the ABBC, a resource that if it nears the level of past years, will include results from nearly 200 different great sources by the time it is finished.

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172 Hours on the Moon, by Johan Harstad

The first thing you have to do before reading this book is accept its hard-to-believe premise. Set in the present day, NASA scientists want to boost interest in the fading space program by sending three teenagers into space. If you can get past the fact that NASA scientists would never think this was a good idea, much less that it actually comes to pass, then you’ll enjoy this book. What makes the plot a bit easier to swallow is that NASA actually has a hidden agenda. They need an excuse to send another team of astronauts to the moon, and the media circus surrounding the worldwide teen astronaut contest will mask the true purpose of the mission. NASA needs to find out if what Armstrong and Aldrin encountered in 1969 is still up there.

The three teens, Midori from Japan, Mia from Norway, and Antoine from France are chosen, trained, and sent into space along with a crew of five astronauts. The majority of the plot takes place after the team has reached the moon, however one significant event occurs to each of the three teens before takeoff. They each have an experience that is unexplained and unsettling and which almost convinces them not to go through with the mission. Someone (or something) doesn’t want humans back on the moon, and from the moment the team lands things begin to go horribly wrong. Events occur at a breakneck pace and the suspense builds to a stunning conclusion.

172 Hours on the Moon is an excellent sci-fi horror story/psychological thriller and one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. It continued to occupy my thoughts for days after I finished reading. The atmosphere is intense, drawing from the isolation of being alone on the moon accompanied by only a few others with extremely limited resources. And then the enemy reveals itself.

Check the WRL catalog for 172 Hours on the Moon.

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Ashen Winter, by Mike Mullin

A very important question for people who love to read is, can the sequel ever be as good as first book? And in this case the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’!

I blogged on Mike Mullin’s debut novel Ashfall in April, and I have been anticipating the release of the sequel Ashen Winter ever since. In Ashfall a supervolcano erupted under Yellowstone National Park and sixteen year old Alex sets off on an odyssey from his home in Iowa to find his family in Illinois. The ash has destroyed the plants, killed the livestock (from breathing the ash), and poisoned the water. In Ashfall  some people are kind, and Alex meets Darla who will become the love of his life. Ten months on in Ashen Winter people’s desperation is growing. No summer came, possibly presaging the beginning of an unbelievably long and cold volcanic winter. Stored food is running out, and the last supplies of necessities we take for granted like antibiotics and gasoline are also running out. Alex struggles to stay true to the values he didn’t even know he had. In a world full of human cruelty and even cannibalism  he wants to save everyone who is innocent. Even his previously mild, spineless father resorts to violence leading Alex to think, “The disaster had warped the landscape of our minds – perhaps even more than it had altered the physical landscape.”

Ashen Winter is as dark as Ashfall and goes at the same breakneck pace. The problems of survival are just as intense, and the characters continue to change and grow in a believable way. I find some apocalyptic books, movies or TV series fascinating in the beginning as the characters deal with how to survive their disasters. Then too many of them descend into soap opera, where the story centers around who is hooking up with whom, rather than who will actually be able to survive to be able to hook up with anyone.

Like its predecessor Ashen Winter is an apocalyptic read that is a good choice for both older teens and adults. It may be too violent and disturbing for younger teens. Try it if you enjoyed The Hunger Games or older apocalyptic titles such as On The Beach or even less well known books like Monument 14.

Ashen Winter was so eagerly anticipated that it had a Blog Tour before its official release date. One blog, My Reading Room, had an interview with Mike Mullin. When asked who is his favorite character in Ashen Winter, Mike Mullin replied “I love Rita Mae, because, well, she’s a librarian.” For a librarian, obviously this is the best answer he could give and shows his good sense and taste!

Check the WRL catalog for Ashen Winter

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Micro, by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

From watching Jurassic Park it seems plausible that Michael Crichton thought, “Hey, what if dinosaurs and people had been around at the same time? People are so helpless. We are small, with no claws and teensy teeth.  We’d just get eaten!”  Which made an exciting (albeit gory) story.  I am guessing that the idea for Micro started in a similar way.  Michael Crichton thought, “What if people were as small as insects? We’re just soft and squishy.  No exoskeleton and only two legs.  We’d just get eaten!”

And sadly for the characters, that is exactly what happens in Micro.  Not for the faint hearted or the weak stomached, Micro is extremely violent and extremely gross. Have you ever seen a nature documentary where the parasitic wasps lay their eggs in the caterpillars, then the larvae hatch and eat the caterpillar from the inside out?  Yuk!  You can’t get much grosser than that.  But imagine the victim isn’t a caterpillar, but a person?  My stomach is uneasy just typing this.  But it doesn’t stop there, the many other nasty ways that insects have of killing and eating each other are explored in exciting, but grisly, detail in Micro.

Michael Crichton died in 2008 before Micro was finished.  To complete the book they selected Richard Preston, whose best books are non-fiction books about diseases and science, try The Hot Zone or Wild Trees.  I think this was an inspired combination.  The book has Michael Crichton’s thrilling pace and Richard Preston’s eye for plausible biological detail.

Micro was an exciting, escapist read that I consumed in one weekend.  Perhaps it is not great literature, and it didn’t receive very good reviews, but when you add an evil corporation, a mad scientist, an exotic tropical location, and a budding love affair, it kept me reading.

Check the WRL catalog for Micro.

 

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The Ask and the Answer, by Patrick Ness

My friend and colleague Charlotte previously recommended the first book in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go. If you haven’t read that book, you ought to stop here, read this post about the series starter and come back to The Ask and the Answer after you’ve read it. Spoiler alerts for anyone who reads on in this post! Still, this YA series is so good that it deserves a second entry.

The second book picks up with Todd and Viola waking to discover that Mayor Prentiss has arrived at Haven and holds them separately captive. The Mayor has changed tactics somewhat, and is now working to win Todd and Viola over to his cause. What follows are chapters full of subtle psychological games, as Todd and Viola try to confirm each other’s safety and reunite, while the Mayor plays both good cop and bad cop in his nasty but subtle style.

The unusual conceit of the series is that a virus left men on this planet unable to hide their thoughts from others. In their heads, each can hear what everyone else is thinking. Women don’t broadcast their thoughts but can hear those of men, an inequality that makes Mayor Prentiss particularly hard on them as he struggles to maintain control. Some residents of Haven give in quickly to his armed dictatorship, but others begin to engage in vicious guerilla warfare, hiding under the mysterious moniker of The Ask. The Mayor responds with his own Gestapo-like organization, The Answer. Not just Todd and Viola are at risk, everyone in Haven is in danger, and the future of the whole planet’s up for grabs, as another wave of colonizing ships is due soon. To make matters worse, the Mayor has discovered a method of masking his thoughts at time, using them like a weapon at others.

Todd, along with the Mayor’s bullying, ne’er-do-well son Davy, is put to work rounding up the planet’s other species, the strange Spackle, and monitoring their forced labor. Viola must recover from injuries, then begins to learn healing arts herself, all the while searching for both Todd and those with whom she could ally to fight the Mayor.

Ness writes masterfully, leaving the reader unsure of whom to trust. Todd, in particular, undergoes a dark journey in this novel, suffering manipulations that lead him to behaviors that give him great shame. The suspense of the outcome of the ongoing war becomes almost secondary to the question of whether Todd can even save his own soul. If you’ve ever wondered how people can become twisted enough to perpetrate the heinous deeds committed during wartime, this book will provide an unforgettable example. There’s drama, suspense, action, and an enduring romance at the core of a series, which should be enjoyable to all adults, whether they’re young or not.

Check the WRL catalog for The Ask and the Answer

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Y: the Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra & Jose Marzan, Jr.

Yorick Brown is on the phone trying to propose to his girlfriend, who is away doing research in Australia, when a catastrophic event wipes out everything with a Y chromosome. In the blink of an eye, Yorick and his monkey Ampersand, for reasons that are unclear, are the last surviving males on the planet. That’s the starting point for Y: the Last Man, a comic series written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan, Jr.

In the ensuing chaos, planes fall from the sky, highways are cluttered with cars full of dead men, and the few women of congress (one of whom is Yorick’s mother) battle for control of the U.S. Presidency, as the only female cabinet officer, the Secretary of Agriculture, is reluctant to take up the role. Various plot lines follow Yorick’s attempt to reach his mother and girlfriend, the battle for control of Washington, the mysterious agent 355, a genetic researcher whose work may be the only hope for repopulation, some militant Israeli army officers, and the emergency of Amazons, a group of women who interpret the disappearance of men as some kind of proof from God that males were scum and the proper order has been restored. It’s hard to say what will happen, but one thing is sure: Yorick, previously nothing much more than a third-rate escape artist, is now a very hot commodity.

This series isn’t particularly cutting edge. The art is nicely done but not revolutionary. I’m recommending it because the premise is intriguing and Vaughan delivers the fun. One good thing about graphic novels is that the serial format allows writers to explore complex, many threaded situations, like an apocalyptic event, in a way that can only be accomplished at the cost of great length in prose or film. In comics, the storytelling remains tight, with plenty of action, but there is room to explore many different aspects of this big gender die off without becoming ponderous. Y: the Last Man is fun and thought-provoking at the same time, without ever becoming too taxing on a reader looking for something that isn’t too heavy.

Check the WRL Catalog for Y: the Last Man

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Monument 14, By Emmy Laybourne

High school junior Dean is starting a normal day in his Colorado suburb, riding his school bus in a future not too different from now, where every child has a minitab that keeps them continuously connected to the Network. Suddenly, strange hail filled with stones and sticks inundates them so terribly that his bus crashes, killing the driver and over half the students. The survivors of the crash are helped into a nearby superstore by the resourceful driver of the nearby elementary school bus. She goes looking for help and eight teenagers are left to look after six small children as the world goes crazy.

From an old fashioned TV they learn that a volcanic eruption in the far away Canary Islands have set off a chain of catastrophes such as the strange hail and earthquakes which have caused the release of chemical weapons. Things are looking very bleak. How will these eight teenagers survive? Will they able to care for the six small children who have unexpectedly become their responsibility?

Monument 14 only covers 12 days, but an amazing amount of action is squeezed into less than two weeks. Like Ashfall (about which I previously posted), Monument 14 starts with a natural disaster that is beyond the control of people, but unlike Ashfall it then delves into the man made disaster of the released chemical weapons.  Monument 14 focuses less on the action and more on the psychology of the previously carefree teenagers and the children who are now their responsibility. There are many characters to keep track of, but they are well drawn with some being likable and others distinctly less so. The teenagers already know each other from high school, but travel different social circles. The teenagers who were popular aren’t necessarily the ones best suited to the extremes of their new situation.

Monument 14 suggests that during an apocalyptic event a superstore is a great place to take shelter, as it has everything you might need–food, medicine, bedding, clothing, and camping supplies to start with. In reality, it may be a terrible place because everyone will want the same supplies and you may have to fight for them. In Monument 14, the store has strong, automatic “riot gates” that close and lock the children in. More importantly, it also locks everyone else out, but other people want to get in, adding to the tension and plot twists.

Monument 14 is another book published for teenagers that many adults will enjoy. It has enough action to keep you on the edge of your seat and enough post-apocalyptic problems and psychology to keep you thinking long after the last page. It ends in a cliffhanger and, according to the author’s website,  the sequel, Monument 14: Sky on Fire, will come out in the summer of 2013. I can’t wait!

Check the WRL catalog for Monument 14.

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Ashfall, by Mike Mullin

Some apocalyptic stories begin with human folly. Ashfall starts with a catastrophe that no human could ever prevent, the eruption of the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park. Some authorities think that these supervolcanic events have occurred several times in the course of human history. They may have caused ice ages and may have caused a bottleneck in human evolution. Perhaps humans can predict supervolcanic events in the short term if we notice a rise in seismic and volcanic activity but no human power can prevent them.

In Ashfall, Alex is an ordinary teenager living in a suburb in Iowa. He argues with his mother and likes playing World of Warcraft. He is thrilled when his parents go on a weekend visit to his uncle’s farm 3 hours’ drive away in Warren, Illinois and leave him home alone for the first time.

Nobody suspected that this routine Friday would be the last ordinary day that anyone in America, and maybe the whole world, would ever see. Alex’s house suddenly explodes into flames and all the phones, internet and even the radios don’t work. He goes to a neighbor’s house and for days the world is plunged into darkness as they are surrounded by a noise so loud that they have to stuff toilet paper in their ears and wear headphones to prevent pain. At first Alex has no idea what is going on, but his neighbor connects the crazy events to a short radio news bulletin about a volcanic eruption.

Even when they know what has happened, nobody knows what it means for them in the short term or humanity in the long term. All Alex knows is that he must find his family, so he sets off with cross country skis and a backpack of food. Conditions are terrible as every water source is poisoned and it becomes so cold that it starts snowing in September, but the behavior of people is far worse. Some are kind, together in towns to look after each other, but with civilization collapsing, criminals have no restraints. Alex meets good people like sharp-tongued Darla but also murderous criminals like Target.

Ashfall can be enjoyed as a tense action adventure with fascinating post-apocalyptic problems. Who would have considered that flat-roofed buildings are a terrible choice during a supervolcanic eruption because they may collapse under the weight of the ash? But Ashfall is more than a simple thriller. Author Mike Mullins movingly and realistically portrays Alex’s growth from a spoiled teenager to a strong and mature young man, capable of surviving in the new, harsh world.

Since this book deals with future events, I will make a prediction. I think this book is destined for popularity. If sequels that are planned to complete the trilogy are as good, they are as well (Ashen Winter is due out October 2012). Yet at the same time I fervently hope Mike Mullins’ predictive skills are lacking and no supervolcanic eruptions are coming soon.

Check the WRL catalog for Ashfall

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Doctor Who

I am taking another risk this week and recommending one of my favorite TV series. But I am finding that Doctor Who is more difficult to write about than The Pinhoe Egg. How do I even attempt to distill the world’s longest running science fiction TV series into a single blog post? *

Doctor Who has everything you expect from a sci-fi series: aliens, spaceships, monsters, distant planets, distant times and, of course, chases and explosions. Unusual from other sci-fi series I have seen, I care deeply about the characters and their lives. The Doctor is a nine-hundred year old, two-hearted, human look-alike alien who is nearly indestructible. He travels around in a retro wooden blue police box time machine, “the TARDIS – a Time and Relative Dimensions In Space” machine, with one or two young and good-looking companions, saving the universe from evil of all sorts. Despite his power The Doctor likes humanity and some humans in particular. He likes us for the same reason I like humanity – for our capacity for love, laughter, and compassion.  He has seen us from our start in caves to our distant future as the universe is ending. Like a good parent he accepts our failings and challenges us to improve. Perhaps his character is best summed up by a quote from the 2010 Christmas Special, “In nine hundred years I have not met anyone who wasn’t important.”

If your spaceship can travel through both time and space you can go anywhere, anytime, and see anything. And The doctor does. Sometimes he goes to strange worlds with strange aliens but often the setting is a near contemporary earth. Doctor Who is unashamedly British, getting in a few jabs at Americans. It visits many British cultural icons in varying episodes that focus on Dickens, Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, the Blitz in London during World War II, Winston Churchill, and Agatha Christie.

Doctor Who aired its first episode in 1963 in a black-and-white series with clunky props and a much slower storyline.  It was taken off the air in 1989 and then it was revived in 2005 in a season packaged misleadingly as The Complete First Series. The stories have improved, special effects have improved, even the monsters have improved. The Doctor has been played by eleven different actors over the years, a dramatic convenience explained away by The Doctor regenerating if he is killed. Each actor manages to add dimensions to his character, so I am not sure who is my favorite.

Although the monsters may be too scary for small children, Doctor Who can be enjoyed by most of the family. There is no sex (attraction is sometimes implied), no gory violence, lots of suspenseful action but the good guys ultimately win. As the actor David Tenant said in his portrayal of the tenth Doctor, “Defending the earth. Can’t argue with that.”

*Although some will argue that because Doctor Who wasn’t running from 1989 to 2004 that Star Trek wins the longevity prize.

Check the WRL catalog for Doctor Who

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The Tomorrow Code, by Brian Falker

What if you built a machine that could receive messages from the future? What messages would you like to receive? Probably your first answer would be winning lottery numbers. But what if, along with the winning numbers, you also received an SOS? Tane and Rebecca receive just such a message, and they sent it to themselves. Something horrific is about to happen to their New Zealand home, and they must decipher their own messages to stop it. They follow the directions they receive to the best of their ability, but they still don’t know exactly what they’re up against. Early attempts to carry out their instructions don’t go exactly as planned, and when the threat does become clear, it might be too late.

A mist has begun moving South through New Zealand. At first, it is centered mostly over farmland, wilderness, and uninhabited land. The first reports from populated areas indicate that it rolled in without warning and then began to thicken. It moves at no consistent rate of speed and moves against the wind. The transmissions end there, and when backup is sent in, they are also never heard from again. Everyone who encounters the mist seems to simply disappear. If this is the danger Tane and Rebecca warned themselves of, how will they ever be able to stop it?

Falkner has written a suspenseful science fiction horror story that kept me turning the pages. While the reasoning behind the creation of the mist seems a bit heavy handed, I suppose that there had to be some sort of back-story for the “villain” of the piece. I won’t give it away, but it works as well as any for this type of sci-fi thriller.

Check the WRL catalog for The Tomorrow Code

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Song of Scarabaeus, by Sara Creasy

Edie Sha’nim is a prodigy. The best cypherteck in the galaxy, she has been trained since childhood to manipulate advanced biocyph seed technology by members of the all-powerful, interstellar Crib empire. This technology helps to terra-form inhospitable alien planets, but the empire uses it hold Fringe worlds to ransom. Every year the “biocyph retroviral automated terraformer seeds” (BRAT seeds) sustaining their ecosystems automatically fail unless the colonies pay the Crib an exorbitant amount for a renewal key.

Edie is kidnapped by mercenaries from a Fringe planet, hoping to exploit her gift to reprogram stolen BRAT seeds. To ensure her cooperation, they “leash” her to a slave bodyguard, Finn—a former member of the Saeth, a shadowy, secretive group of freedom fighters. If she cooperates, they promise her freedom from a life she hates as well as freedom from her manipulative, ambitious mentor, Natesa. But if Edie tries to escape or strays from Finn’s side, he dies. Finn and Edie have no choice but to trust each other as they fight for their freedom from both the mercenaries and the Crib.

Finn is the very embodiment of “tall, dark, and mysterious,” and we only learn about his past in small increments. Edie, sensitive but defiant, is the heart of the story, and the romance that develops between the two is understated and does not overshadow the rest of the plot.

One of the book’s strengths is the author’s intricate and detailed world-building. The author handles descriptions so skillfully that you aren’t left feeling overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity and sophistication of the universe she has created. Creasy has created a fascinating universe, full of eerie alien landscapes and intriguing scientific speculation.

Song of Scarabaeus was nominated for the 2010 Philip K. Dick Award and the 2010 Aurealis Award for “Best SF Novel.” It is a brilliant debut, from a very promising new author, with a subtle romance at its heart that can be enjoyed by romance and sci-fi readers alike. There is enough action and suspense to satisfy SF fans, and enough tension and simmering chemistry to keep romance fans happy too. And if you enjoy it, don’t miss the sequel, Children of Scarabaeus.

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Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Here’s a blast from the 1980s past, combined with a futuristic dystopia in a novel that’s just plain fun.

Ernest Cline’s debut novel Ready Player One is set in a future where fuel shortages, wars, and corporate destruction have made real life miserable. The protagonist is Wade Watts, an Oklahoma City teenager whose real life is relentlessly grim. But like most of the other people in 2044, Wade stays positive by spending most of his time controlling his avatar in a virtual world, OASIS, a world of worlds where players can have almost any experience imaginable. The OASIS was programmed by a brilliant but somewhat cracked man: James Halliday made a huge fortune from his brainchild, and on his death announced that he had hidden an easter egg in the game. The player who finds will claim his fortune and his company.

As the novel opens, three years have passed, and none of the easter egg hunters (or “gunthers” as they’ve come to be known) has succeeded in solving even the first level of Halliday’s puzzle. All that changes when Wade passes the first gate and sees his avatar’s name at the top of a high score list. This makes him the envy not only of regular gunthers, but of a sinister corporation that wants to find the easter egg so it can take over OASIS and turn it into a source of income. Dozens of their employees cheat by playing as a team, ganging up on the other virtual players, and when they can find their real life identities, sometimes attacking in the real world. Wade works to solve the other puzzles and finds friendship and romance (albeit virtual) with other players, but at the same time, he becomes a target, both in real life and the game.

What makes Cline’s book distinctive is its homage to 1980s geek culture. Halliday was in love with that culture, so the OASIS, the gunthers, and the puzzles on the way to the easter egg are all dependent on 80s films, books, role playing games, comics, and music.

If you like computer gaming of any kind or 80s culture, I suspect that you’ll have a blast with this quick reading science fiction adventure novel.

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Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey

In this fast-moving space opera, the political and military tensions between Earth, Mars, and the colonies of the asteroid belt are already racked like billiard balls, just waiting for something to set them spinning out of control.

Jim Holden is an idealistic spaceship XO, lately slumming it on an ice hauler back and forth from Saturn to the human colonies of the asteroid belt. Joe Miller, a native Belter, is a washed-up, morose cop well on his way to an alcoholic early retirement. Short, quick-moving chapters alternate between the cop and the XO, ordinary joes who are about to become major players on a very, very big stage.

Holden and crew are lured to the wreckage of a ship, fittingly named the Scopuli, but their rescue mission turns into an ambush. Miller’s missing persons investigation puts him on the trail of something far bigger and more malevolent than he expected. Holden unwittingly starts a war. Miller is this close to uncovering the most cold-blooded perversion of science since Josef Mengele, in between drinks. Holden does the right thing, no matter what. Miller does what needs to be done, damn the consequences. When the paths of the two men converge, their combined hard-headed self-righteousness may be enough to destroy the solar system as we know it.

Or maybe that will be the giant, mutating, possibly sentient former asteroid crawling with human-alien zombified biomatter and transmitting jibberish into space like Radio Mad Ophelia.

Mixing good, old-fashioned space battles with a detective-novel vibe and not a little horror, Leviathan Wakes is the first of a planned series. You can read the prologue and first chapter online.

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The Postmortal, by Drew Magary

A note from Jessica: I’ve been with BFGB since its inception 4.5 years ago. This will be my last review, since I’m leaving for a new job in a new state. Writing about books has been my favorite part of working at WRL. Thank you for the good times, readers.

They call it a cure for death, but that’s misleading. You can still drown or starve or fall out a window. It is merely a cure for aging, it is completely illegal, and it can be had for seven thousand dollars on the black market. That’s not a bad deal in the year 2019.

John Farrow decides to get the cure at age 29. He can afford it on his income as a lawyer, especially now that he’s changing his specialty to divorce law. (“‘Til Death Do Us Part” has taken on new meaning.) He does not struggle with the decision. He is not Catholic, so he can’t be excommunicated. He is not worried about potential societal consequences of pollution, scarce resources, or violence. He is normally a logical and conscionable thinker, but, he realizes, “no argument could be made against my profound interest in not dying.”

After a few years of indecision, the United States legalizes the cure. This sharply-decelerated death rate provides a fallow playground for debut novelist Magary, who imagines all sorts of unintended consequences. There are the Peter Pan cases, young children whose mothers illegally suspend aging in their infants. There are the hyper-violent trolls who forswear the cure and instead seek to maim, but not kill, people who might live forever. There are the viruses that now have decades to perfect their attacks against individuals. And there are new career opportunities, even as the planet bulges with people. Our hero John eventually takes a job as an End Specialist, a government employee who grants death to people who no longer want to be cured of aging.

John is a shrewd narrator with a strong streak of resilience, imperative for people trying to survive in a post-aging world. The novel starts out as a quirky thought-piece, filled with speculative “What-if?” scenarios of the near future, but it gets progressively deeper as the years go by. The ranks of the homeless swell. Cars are abandoned when worldwide gasoline reserves are tapped dry. Transportation grinds to a halt.  Some nations use nuclear weapons to control their populations, while other nations employ ageless armies as career pillagers.

Though playful at first, Magary’s book transforms into a bleak vision of the future. Let us hope it is not prophetic.

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Hourglass, by Myra McEntire

Emerson can see dead people. Or, to be more precise, she can see people from the past. Sometimes they are easy to identify—the Scarlett O’Hara wannabe in the hoop skirt was easy to peg—but others look just like the living. It’s not until she brushes against them, or tries to interact with them, that she realizes they aren’t really there. It has become especially problematic now that more and more of the past is bleeding into her present. Where she would once see only individuals, now objects and entire scenes from the past are visible. Emerson’s visions began just before the tragic death of her parents, and now her brother and legal guardian Thomas is determined to find Emerson some help. She’s tried shamans, psychics, therapists, and nothing has worked. When she is heavily medicated the hallucinations stop, but she can’t function in that zombified state forever.

Enter Michael, a consultant from The Hourglass, who Thomas has hired to work as Emerson’s mentor. Michael is surprisingly unfazed by Emerson’s visions, and even has terminology for the things she can see. He calls them Rips, short for Ripples, and is adamant that The Hourglass can help her. Michael is slow to reveal his secrets, but Emerson soon realizes that Thomas’s hiring of Michael wasn’t exactly coincidental. She (and her ability) would be extremely useful to Michael’s latest project.

Hourglass is the first in a series, and I’m looking forward to reading more stories set in the world McEntire has created. She spends a bit of time setting up the rules that her characters must live by, and dropping hints for future novels, but succeeded in leaving me wanting more. There is enough going on that McEntire could have left out one of the romantic rival sub-plots (which has hopefully been permanently resolved) but that ultimately amounts to only a minor annoyance.

Check the WRL catalog for Hourglass.

 

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