Okay, so right up front: this book is not perfect. But it is tense (oh god so tense; I had to take breaks to get through this) and suspenseful and gooOkay, so right up front: this book is not perfect. But it is tense (oh god so tense; I had to take breaks to get through this) and suspenseful and good, and if this is truly a first novel, someday Higgins is going to write something great. I will watch her career with interest, is what I'm saying.
In any list of the things I liked about this, the characters have to be the first entry. And that's interesting, because the male characters in this book are pretty flat, kind of dull, sort of ciphers; it's like Higgins had only so much rendering energy and she burned it all on the female characters. I'm for this. The dudes can fade unimportantly into the background while the ladies are fascinating. That works for me, especially when so many of them are my favorite kinds of characters. (Key among them: the woman who loves machines and would much rather not deal with feelings. Spacetoasters, you remain true perfection in fictional form. Never leave me.) This did have the kind of weird side effect of making me side with a terrible person for about half the book, just because she was so much realer and her opponent was so chintzy (and also he was manipulating my spacetoaster, which is Not Okay). But, hey, these things happen. I got it sorted out eventually.
I loved the convolutions of the plot -- to be honest, they're somewhat predictable, especially if you're genre aware, but it doesn't matter if you've seen the roller coaster's curves before you ride it. The ride is the point, and this ride is fun. Higgins didn't quite stick the landing, but it's the first book in a series, apparently, so I'll wait and see how that plays out before I judge it.
And Higgins knows how to make suspense work. I was struck, reading this, about how sparse it is, how little she needs to drive the tension engine. I kept mentally comparing it to Illuminae, a genuinely bad book that attempted to accomplish roughly the same thing as Lightless. Illuminae's authors threw everything they could think of at the book to ratchet up the tension and only managed to be irritating. Higgins succeeds using only computer malfunctions and a creeping sense of dread.
If you like spaceships and intrigue and suspense and robots and thieves and plots and lots of fascinating women, this is the book for you. And I love all those things, so this was most definitely a book for me.
If this book was made into a movie (and it will not be), the tagline could be: "We're theoretical cosmologists. We get it right or universes die." BecIf this book was made into a movie (and it will not be), the tagline could be: "We're theoretical cosmologists. We get it right or universes die." Because that's what this is: a suspenseful thriller based on physics, metaphysics, philosophy, and cosmology. Admit it, you're impressed.
So. In Distress, a disaffected science/pseudoscience journalist goes off for what should be a peaceful, easy assignment: a documentary on a physicist who is about to announce her Theory of Everything. Except, well, shit gets weird.
For the first quarter of the book, I didn't think I'd be giving it four stars. The opening scene is dynamite, but -- not really indicative of the kind of book it's going to be. And I found the relationship stuff (the narrator and his girlfriend) honestly repelling. And the discussion of autism -- that is a WHOLE other bucket of issues, and while the ending made me get why he thought he needed to include it, I think that was, at best, a bad idea.
But. BUT. Then the book started to gain momentum. Partly it was that the worldbuilding started to take hold. I loved the detailed near-future world; the science advances, the biology changes, the sex and gender stuff. (I'm reading so much hard SF with great, interesting, thoughtful takes on gender these days, like, what even HAPPENED to this genre? If two genders ("normal" and "sex object/plot device") were good enough for the grandmasters, they are surely good enough for you, Greg Egan and Kim Stanley Robinson and Chris Moriarty.) And then, while I was wallowing in the glee of the worldbuilding, the actual main plot kicked in and started accelerating and every neuron in my brain shrieked "YES! MORE!" in unison.
As it happens, I've read a number of books lately about singularities. This is the best portrayal I've seen of one. It was great and I enjoyed the hell out of it. This story is too much the kind of thing I like for me to recommend it to anyone else, but I can say this: if this is your kind of thing, this is REALLY REALLY your kind of thing. ...more
Okay, so the opening of this book is really damn solid: telephones raining down from the sky on a repressed backwater colony world, all of which say, Okay, so the opening of this book is really damn solid: telephones raining down from the sky on a repressed backwater colony world, all of which say, "Entertain us." And from there it's all a bit...standard. And dull.
I get this feeling from Stross every time I read him, which is that he has great ideas in isolation, but no way to string them together to form an interesting and novel setting, culture, world, universe. Or plot. So what you get is a very standard book with some extremely shiny frippery grafted onto it: singularity! A wish-granting telephone repair system! Godlike beings obsessed with preserving causality! But it all boils down to the same sort of story Ian Fleming was telling in the 1950s.
I don't know. I found this mildly entertaining, but it didn't give me what I hope for from hard SF: new ideas, new worlds, new futures. And it didn't give me what I hope for from espionage and thriller novels: heart-pounding tension that compels me to keep turning the pages. And it didn't give me what I want from every novel: interesting characters who feel like people. What it did give me was some words to move my eyes over that reminded me of better things I've read. And for me that's not enough. ...more
Some years ago, I made a conscious effort to switch my home genre from hard SF to fantasy. Fantasy had more women writing in it,Oh my yes. Oh MY yes.
Some years ago, I made a conscious effort to switch my home genre from hard SF to fantasy. Fantasy had more women writing in it, and it seemed to be growing and developing as a genre, while SF stagnated. There seemed to be far fewer fantasy books where women existed only as prizes, as nonsentients, as set dressing, as motivation for the Man to do Manly Things for Manly Reasons. There were fewer (though still many, sadly) fantasy books where queer people and brown people just didn't exist. There was heart in fantasy, too, that hard SF seemed to have lost.
At first it was rough, trading spaceships for dragons. But I adjusted.
But this book. This book is everything I once hoped to find in hard SF and gave up on ever seeing there. It's smart and fun and imaginative and there's enough science to make you salivate. The characters are real people, the future comes in all colors, and queerness appears to be standard-issue. The technology and science affect society and politics. People remain people, but the world has changed.
And this book is good. It's compelling, it's twisty, it's smart. (Yes, okay, there was a point at like 60% in where I went, "Okay, that's it, that's one twist too many," but I got better.) I read it in a day. (After waiting several days to start it because it begins in my least favorite place: Right Before Everything Goes to Hell. But it's all up from there.) And I finished it wanting more. (And realized it's basically just the setup, and I'm not sure the rest of the series can follow through on the promise of this one. But I'm looking forward to finding out.)
And at the end there was a delightful bonus waiting for me. Most SF books are other genres filtered through an SF lens. Action adventure (but in space)! Court intrigue (but with clones)! Mystery (but with robots)! Literary fiction (but by Philip K. Dick)! It took me until the last 10% of this book to see what genre it's blended with, and once I did, I loved it even more. (view spoiler)[It's a romance, a romance between an AI and someone who genuinely believes she's incapable of love and has put so much distance between herself and her feelings she can't remember where she put them. (In other words, a romance between my two favorite kinds of people.) And that's something I hardly ever saw in SF in the bad old days (romance is for girls, don't you know). I love it. (hide spoiler)]
Basically, this was awesome and satisfying and made me happy in a way SF hasn't in years. Yes, please, thank you....more
thefourthvine
>
Books:
hard-sff
(8)
Loading...
