As I’ve always said, short stories are where the newest science-fiction ideas first appear and it’s been too long since I last read a decent collection of them. qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes who seems to be a self-published author and makes many of his stories free to read on his personal website. I haven’t read those stories before but I do know that he is a contributor to the SCP Foundation website and I have read many of the stories there. This is a very short book and the individual stories are not so much stories as scenarios. That’s fine by me as I’m here for the ideas, not the dramatic arcs.
Unsongis a web novel by Scott Alexander who is best known for the popular Slate Star Codex blog. I’m not really a regular reader but I do pay attention to it. The saga of the blog and the person behind it makes for a fascinating story in its own right but I won’t go into that here. This novel is set in an alternative history in which the Apollo 8 mission breaks the firmament around Earth as described in Biblical scripture and causes disruptions in the nature of reality. It turns out that everything described in the Talmud is literally true. Angels exist, the laws of physics are broken and the United States is broken up into fiefs led by local powers. People who learn to speak the Names of God can invoke magical effects and a worldwide organization called Unsong is formed to regulate their use.
Greg Egan is still my favorite science-fiction writer and I’m glad to see that he is still producing work. Even so his more recent work has been disappointing and this one with a length somewhere between a novella and a novel, is so underwhelming that I find it impossible to recommend to anyone. It’s still a quintessentially Egan story in that longtime fans will immediately recognize what it is in here that interests him but it’s such a narrow conceit that it’s hard to imagine many people would be similarly enthusiastic and Egan fails to develop an interesting story around it.
Finally, I’m back to working through the list of the great science-fiction novels of all time and this must be one of the weirdest entries on the list. It was originally published in 1956 under the title of Tiger! Tiger!, named after William Blake’s poem. The newer title makes it feel more like science-fiction certainly but the original title really captures its spirit better: an unapologetic paean to the individual superman. As a tour de force of pure imagination the book is marvelous and no wonder it’s considered a classic of the genre. Still I must admit that the deliberately wild ride that is its plot and and the odiousness of its protagonist makes it a difficult novel for me to enjoy.
R.F. Kuang’s name has been making the rounds lately due to her new novel Babel which critics have been talking up. She’s a Chinese-American writer whose work is new to me and browsing through her published work I was more intrigued by her debut novel. It’s set in a fantasy version of China that is weakened by internal disunity and widespread addiction to opium. It follows the story of a female young orphan who enrolls into the country’s top military and in that sense feels similar to many of the webfiction series around today. Unfortunately while I liked the worldbuilding and the early parts of the novel, to me, it goes off the rails as the action picks up and turned me off completely. I will not be reading the sequels of this trilogy.
I discovered the Wild Cards series back when I was still in high school and of course this was also before George R.R. Martin became a household name. Being also a comic book reader at the time, this series ticked all of the right boxes for me: it had superheroes, it wasn’t afraid of adult themes and featured characters who had to deal with complex psychological issues, and its storylines tied in with real world news and US-based politics. Being a fan of this series made me feel all snobbish about how sophisticated I was. I eventually bought the books up to the seventh volume but I was missing the second book that I was never able to find. I could infer the events in it from what I read in the subsequent volumes yet every once in a while I would still recall that I never managed to read this. Now with the entire series available on Kindle, I thought I’d remedy this little hole in my life.
As promised, I finishing the final part of what ought to really be the first complete book starring Murderbot. I do believe this may well be my favorite entry of the set of four as there is somewhat less combat in here and instead Murderbot mostly has to deal with infiltrating a large space station while posing as a human and spends a lot of his time agonizing over meeting his original crew again. Finally we get the conversations and emotional closure I’ve been longing for over Murderbot being accepted as a person. This doesn’t redeem the series as a whole in my eyes but it does make bring it to a suitably fitting end.
