Category Archives: Books

Books

Gardens of the Moon

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In my ongoing quest to read all of the major fantasy series (leaving aside obvious crap like David Eddings and Terry Goodkind stuff), I recently bought Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, the first book of his Malazan Book of the Fallen series. (As an aside, I’ve recently being buying books from the UK-based The Book Depository, which is noteworthy mainly for offering free shipping anywhere in the world, not to mention prices that beat any Malaysian retailers. The downside of course is that you need to wait for about a month to get your book. If anyone knows of any online store that can offer better deals for someone residing in Malaysia, do let me know.)

The Malazan books have quite a fanbase and, with all ten books in Erikson’s series now out, plus another four books by the co-creator of their shared world, Ian Cameron Esslemont, seem to be decently successful. Review-wise, however, the verdicts are all over the chart. The most enthusiastic fans rate Erikson’s work more highly even than G.R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Given that these include some very smart people from QT3, I’m not inclined to dismiss their opinions lightly. To the detractors however, his story is an incomprehensible mess, plagued by bland prose, cliched and boring characters and poor storytelling sense. After slogging through all 600+ pages of the first book, I’m sad to say that I have to include myself in the latter camp.

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Books, Science Fiction

Schild’s Ladder

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I’ve been cleaning up some of the old books I have scattered around my mother’s house. Some of these have been too damaged by poor storage conditions and need to be junked. Some others I’m too embarrassed to keep and will be donated. The rest needs to be packed up to be ready to be moved to Seremban. Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder is of course in that last category and while staying in Kuala Lumpur, I’ve found that my memory of it was poor enough to merit rereading the novel. Since I’ve never written about this particular book here as well, I thought I’d remedy that as well.

The Wikipedia entry for this novel calls it Greg Egan’s hardest SF book ever and considering that Egan is easily the hardest of the hard SF writers, this is a daunting statement indeed. This is because Schild’s Ladder begins with a fictional theory that unifies relativity with quantum mechanics, the so-called Sarumpaet rules of Quantum Graph Theory. In the far future universe of the novel, this has been the basic foundation of all physics for thousands of years even as humanity has spread out and diversified throughout the galaxy. Some of these descendents of humanity exist only as pure software constructs. The acorporeals as they are known  aren’t even raised in an analogue of 3D space, preferring more complex spaces due to the belief that this will unnecessarily restrain the flexibility of their developing minds.

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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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