I was leery about the premise behind this novel when I first heard about but hey if people like a genderbent version of the Chinese classic Water Margin, why not? Then it was a finalist for the Nebula Award and was recommended by a bunch of critics, so I thought I should give it a shot. Specifically I was curious about web fiction not being widely recognized and wondered how a properly published book lauded by mainstream critics would match up. My verdict is not well at all. It’s an entertaining action-adventure that can be sometimes quite amusing but I wouldn’t consider it a deep book or even good writing.
I’ve read plenty of short stories by Harlan Ellison though I don’t consider myself to be much of a fan. His novels are not considered notable and I suspect that a large part of his legacy comes from his contributions to television shows like the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone. His Dangerous Visions anthologies were hugely influential however and this final book was announced in 1973 and never came out. Ellison died in 2018 but his estate’s executor J. Michael Straczynski continued working on it and so now here it is.
This is one of the vintage science-fiction books I’ve been dipping into from time to time, one of the recommendations I got from YouTube. I found it notable in that it can be sharply divided into two parts which are very different from one another. I’d characterize the first part as a fairly stereotypical military SF story of the era that feels like it’s working towards the protagonist becoming an action hero. But then partway through he gets killed and then things get really crazy. Unfortunately I didn’t really like either part and I disliked the low-key sexism throughout. The best thing that I can say is that it’s a short book and so was easy to get through.
Again, venturing out of my usual habit of reading only fiction, I decided to read this so-called fictionalized biography which has been making the rounds. It supposedly recounts the life of the legendary polymath John von Neumann but is really more general than that. It’s full of anecdotes about the circle of genius scientists around von Neumann and most significantly traces how his ideas led to what is today called AI. It’s not really a popular science book as it’s very thin in terms of scientific facts and most of that is common knowledge. What it does offer is the inside perspective of many of these famous personalities, at least as imagined by author Benjamin Labatut. It’s debatable how authentic these stories are true in spirit according to what we know about them and that has to be good enough.
I’ve been wanting to read this entry in the Culture series for ages but couldn’t because for some unknown reason it is not available on Kindle when all of the other books are. In the end, I was forced to buy a paperback book for the first time in years. I particularly wanted to read this book because it supposedly describes how the Culture responds when it encounters an entity far more powerful than itself. It’s easy to uphold your professed ideals when nothing actually threatens you so the real test is when you face at least a peer of equal power. Unfortunately this book did not adequately answer that dilemma at all as the entity is just not that hostile. It is arguably more about how the various factions inside the Culture itself exploits the opportunity the entity presents as well as a love story that I find distracting and not very interesting.
Seeing as the recent crop of genre fiction novels have not been terribly interesting to me, I’ve been venturing out to read a more diverse selection of books, especially non-fictional ones. This one is a memoir by a woman who was living in Berlin during the time it fell and was captured by the advancing Red Army in 1945. It’s a short book and covers a relatively short period of time from April to June 1945. But it’s packed full of detail as witnessed by a woman who is both exceptionally erudite and brutally honest in recording her experiences. The author was anonymous when the memoir was originally published but after her death, her identity has since been revealed to be Marta Hillers, a German journalist.
I loved the Pantheon series and seeing as I’ve never read any of Ken Liu’s original fiction, I thought I’d check out the collection of short stories it came from. In fact, only three of the stories in this collection form the basis of the television series and the written form is very different. The rest are a mixed bag. Some explore alternative versions of similar ideas. Others are purely fantasy stories. My favorites are when he explores questions about identity in which the speculative fiction elements are almost incidental. There’s no real central theme to this collection however so it must have been composed of whatever work Liu had that was available and I have to say that on the whole, it isn’t a particularly brilliant book.
