Category Archives: Books

Books

Towers of Midnight

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Way back at the beginning of this year, I wrote a post on the first chapter of the Wheel of Time series that was handed off to Brandon Sanderson. Now as 2011 draws to a close, it’s time to do the same for the penultimate chapter of a saga that first started over twenty years ago. As usual for the series, this is a massive tome, with my paperback version clocking in at an incredible 1,200+ pages. I like to think that it’s so massive that even the printers have a hard time with these books, as a good portion of the pages from my copy have faded ink. Be warned that spoiler abound, in case you’re the type to get squeamish about such things.

As with The Gathering Storm, old plotlines are resolved at a furious pace. One of the main ones in particular dates all the way back to the very first book in the series, The Eye of the World, where Perrin Aybara killed two Children of the Light in a frenzy of bloodlust. Another deals with the nigh invulnerable gholam which has been hunting Mat Cauthon since book seven. For the fans, I believe this book also ends all of the will they or won’t they romantic threads left dangling. Just about every major character gets a romantic partner. This includes not just the long expected pairing of Egwene al’Vere and Gawyn Trakand, but also such characters as Morgase Trakand, Thom Merrilin and even Berelain of Mayene!

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Books

Chronicles of the Black Company

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Most fantasy series take place in an imagined world filled with powerful magic and fantastic creatures. As a matter of course, the stories tend to focus on the lives and doings of the most powerful and influential beings of their age, the better for readers to a get a proper sense of the epic scale of events as they unfold as well as to be sure of having a front row seat to the most spectacular battles. Glen Cook’s The Black Company series is set in a unnamed world that is no less wondrous than that of his fellow fantasy writers. Here there are the usual ancient evils and prophecies; sleeping gods and sorcerors potent enough to create storms or turn large companies of soldiers to ash; monsters such as were-panthers, talking stones and flying mantas.

What sets this series apart is its focus not on the generals and nobility, the most puissant mages and most renowned generals, but on the lowly common foot soldiers that make up the bulk of every army. In this case, the spotlight is on the Black Company, a band of mercenaries who peddle their services to the highest bidder. Chronicles of the Black Company is an omnibus volume that brings together the first three novels of the series, The Black Company, Shadows Linger and The White Rose. The first of these books were published  in 1984 but I only heard about this series several years ago from QT3.

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Books, Science Fiction

Roadside Picnic

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Russian writers seem to have a special talent for highlighting the grimness and misery of ordinary life. Roadside Picnic, a novella by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is a fine example of how this morosity shows up even in science-fiction. Computer gaming fans will know this novella, first published in 1972, as the ultimate inspiration for the STALKER series of games, albeit by way of the film version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that was released in 1979.

Naturally, the original novella differs markedly from the video game. The novella for example is set in the fictional town of Harmont in some unnamed Commonwealth country, instead of the area around the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine. This in turn is only one of six zones scattered around the global that were created by the alien visitation event. Still, many themes and even individual elements, such as how the stalkers use throw bolts to detect the boundaries of some types of anomalies, will be recognizable to STALKER fans.

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Books

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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What’s this, you ask? You’ve read all of the Harry Potter books but have never heard of this one? That’s because Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work in progress piece of fan-fiction, written by someone under the pen-name Less Wrong. That person is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and an advocate for transhumanism. Now I ordinarily don’t go anywhere near fan-fiction regardless of how much I may like a series or a setting. It’s a dark recess of the Internet with a well-deserved reputation for terrible writing inspired mostly by the obsession to pair favorite characters into romantic couples, regardless of how little sense that actually makes.

MoR however distinguishes itself from its peers both through the quality of its writing and the strength of its fundamental premise. It’s been endorsed by established sci-fi writer David Brin, been featured on The Atlantic magazine and it is by far the most reviewed story on the popular FanFiction.net website. That’s some heavyweight support and after reading what’s been released so far of it, I agree wholeheartedly. This is something that every person who thinks of himself as a rationalist must read and every person who is a Harry Potter fan ought to read.

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Books, Science Fiction

The Windup Girl

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I picked up The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi solely on the strength of the blurb advertising it as having won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel. Not bad for a debut novel by a relatively unknown writer. It turned out to be a very pleasant surprise and I was particularly impressed by how deftly it portrays Southeast Asia. While I have misgivings about the plot and how events rush to an unsatisfying end, I still consider it to be one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years (not that I’ve been reading much admittedly).

Despite the title, the real star of the show here is arguably the city of Bangkok itself which is where the novel is set. In the 23rd century, the rising waters caused by global warming has destroyed many cities and even entire countries. With the world’s fossil fuels all but depleted, globalization as we now know it, is no more. The most powerful entities are the biotechnology companies who feed the world using their genehacked crops, maintaining their dominance by employing bio-engineered plagues to destroy natural food sources and even sending in private armies to topple governments when necessary.

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Books

The Gathering Storm

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A word to the wise, if you have yet to begin reading the Wheel of Time series, please don’t start now. I first started reading the series over fifteen years ago. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth book in the series and the first to be written by Brandon Sanderson following the death of the original author who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan. The thirteenth book, Towers of Midnight, has recently been released but I’m waiting for the paperback edition. The current plan is that there will be one last book after this to finish the series.

The sheer volume of text alone certainly qualifies the series as being epic. While it’s a tragedy that Jordan died before he managed to complete his tale, there’s no faulting him for not trying his darnest, turning new manuscripts in like clockwork. Unfortunately, the prose is pretty uneven in quality. Some of the last few books that Jordan wrote himself were so forgettable that I actually bought one of them twice because I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d already read it! This is because the books were so full of foreshadowing and plotting that hardly anything of note actually happened and the story barely advanced at all.

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Books, Science Fiction

Zendegi

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But was she conscious – as much as the women who’d help build her would have been conscious if, for a few seconds, they’d forgotten themselves and focused entirely on their simple tasks: thinking of a word, matching a picture?
…
Still, at most it could only be a transient form of consciousness – with no conception of itself to underpin a fear of extinction. Splicing Fariba, and a thousand variants of her, into narratives in which they played no active part wouldn’t bolster their fragmentary minds into something more substantial; that was just the illusion that human players would receive. The Faribas would still live – if they lived at all – in an eternal present, doing their simple tasks over and over again, remembering nothing.

– Greg Egan in Zendegi

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Greg Egan’s newest novel, Zendegi, is that it’s the most grounded and hence approachable of any of his books. Inspired by the real-life events in Iran in 2009 and backed by a personal trip that the author made to the country, the book starts out being more of a spy thriller than a hard science-fiction novel. In 2012 as Iran readies itself for a fresh round of parliamentary elections, Australian journalist Martin Seymour makes a break with his previous life as he is sent to cover them. However the elections turn out to be more exciting than anticipated when a scandal involving a member of Iran’s Guardian Council is unearthed, with Martin right in the heart of the events, making news rather than just covering it. This leads to a massive uprising that eventually leads to the reinstatement of true democracy in the country.

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