This is one of those books that is going to take a while to assimilate. I am attempting a review, which may or may not actuallyIncomprehensible review
This is one of those books that is going to take a while to assimilate. I am attempting a review, which may or may not actually be a true reflection of my reading experience.
This leads us deep into the forest of ethics, wherein there is a festival of ambiguity.
There is bucketloads happening, mostly pertaining to a singularity event on a far flung and isolated colony of future, post diaspora humanity, and initiated (or driven) by something called The Festival (an “information plague”… or something else entirely...).
’It’s beginning. Better strap yourself in – we’re way too close for comfort.’
Since there is a lot going on here, there is a lot to either like, or dislike, depending on your leanings.
What did I like? The space battles, such as they are. It’s a unique-ish approach, dealing with closed time loops / causality events (among other things), grey goo (nanotech, for the uninitiated), as well as (more conventional, in a manner of speaking) exploding and kinetic objects being accelerated over vast differences.
What did I dislike? Well, it’s an occasionally bizarre story with some humorous elements that I struggled to get a handle on. It’s hard to describe, but this is either something you will appreciate… or not at all. After all, the book pretty much starts with cell phones raining down from space.
Fortunately I don’t have to write too much about Singularity Sky. There are lots of reviews posted here, and the book was hot property when it came out in 2003 (it was nominated for a Hugo award in 2004) so there is enough discussion already to keep the curious satisfied.
Riding a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent posthumanism without an intervening stage, [he] drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.
The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence that they hadn’t fully understood - until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had warned them. They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology - but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.
In the end, it is the nature of the Festival, or the big reveal, that pretty much makes or breaks the novel. Or, that’s to say, the nature of the Festival in conjunction with the author’s depiction of human socio-political behaviour in extreme circumstances. The novel is also a commentary on censorship / freedom of speech and the nature of information and interpretation thereof.
In conclusion, it’s a clever novel, but possibly too clever for me. I enjoyed it well enough though, although I suspect that some of the nuances were lost on me. I would have loved to give this exactly 3.5 stars (a bit of a cop out) but now I am sitting with the dilemma of rounding up or down.
Houses grew and fissioned in slow motion, great sessile beasts prodded hither and yon by their internal symbionts. It was all unspeakably alien to him: an eerie half-life crawling over the once-familiar city, echoes of the way he’d lived for years, lying like a corpse in an open casket. Even the searing light of a nighttime shuttle landing at the field outside the city could-n’t bring it back to a semblance of the life he’d known....more
I cannot imagine conquering worlds like this, not this scattered necklace of ships spinning and spinning around the core. My memory sparks and kicks aI cannot imagine conquering worlds like this, not this scattered necklace of ships spinning and spinning around the core. My memory sparks and kicks and quails like a captured beast of pure, terrified energy.
Hard to express my opinions on this one. It wasn’t what I expected. In some ways it was much better than I had expected. It’s a tough one to process, and a challenging read in more ways than one.
Yet I feel the wailing in my bones, like some mournful monster roused from sleep.
It is a bleak, bleak story. Horror in Science Fiction isn’t a new concept. Arguably, neither is body horror, but the way it is applied here is somewhat insidious. Just about everything about the world(s) the author has created has a grotesque aspect, and is depicted in organic and biological terms. It’s just really uneasy and edgy.
And in this place, among worlds where organic matter was the literal lifeblood of the world, a daughter was everything.
No doubt world building is a tricky thing, and the massive scale here complicates the issue. It’s all very promising, and often intriguing, but this fictional universe doesn’t always feel fully realized. Everything is just a bit vague and unfocused, and critical details are always just out of reach. It is left up to the reader to figure out the nature, and the rules, of this setting as the story goes along. Possibly this is intentional, mirroring the state of the protagonist without memory.
”What happens to dead worlds?” “They are eaten. Salvaged for parts until they no longer hold together. Have you never seen the death of a world?”
While portions of the book reads like a Hans Bellmer exhibition, it actually grew on me. I was roped in and remained intrigued as to how everything would pan out.
I am not always the most astute reader, when it comes to recognizing metaphor and commentary in fictional literature, but it did definitely feel like there were some undercurrents here. For example: the power of a woman over her own body, social and cultural norms and expectations, and equality.
I take a few steps, but my strength gives out. Or perhaps it’s my will. I sink to my knees on the soft ground. No doubt it’s covered in the excrement of whatever creatures are roosting in the walls, but I don’t care. We’re all the same thing. We’re all shit. We’re all flesh. We’re all sentient.
There is an existential crisis in the world(s) of Legion, accompanied by some existential dread. “What is the point of all this?” seems to be a theme throughout. This question is not just asked by the cast of characters, but also filters through to the reading experience. It is a bizarre, but occasionally powerful book.
I imagine us circling the misty Core of the sun for generation after generation, locked in a battle not just with ourselves but with the terrible things growing around us and inside of us, tying us so closely to themselves that we cannot exist without them.
In summary, this is a space opera that is quite unlike anything else I have read. It takes place in bizarro world, and touches on topics like the nature of freedom and sacrifice. It is also well paced for the most part (there is little bit of drift in the middle section), but all in all I enjoyed it well enough to give it 3.5 rounded up to 4. It made me squirm, and it made me think. ...more
It’s that time again. Where I try to explain how I don’t like giving books negative reviews, and all that, but let’s j….and another conflicted review…
It’s that time again. Where I try to explain how I don’t like giving books negative reviews, and all that, but let’s just get to it and see where it goes.
Even though there is nothing particularly heavy handed here (which I think is a redeeming factor), this is a Science Fiction novel that seems predominantly concerned with Social Sciences. It touches on topics like religion, race, sexuality and morality, for example, but the narrative of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is problematic. The book focuses on the relationships between a number of human and alien characters (and one Artificial Intelligence) but never really creates any tension. In fact, I could argue that there isn’t a lot of plot either. Is tension an absolute requirement? No, it isn’t, but I daresay that books that are suspenseful are more thrilling to read than books that, well, aren’t. This novel doesn’t really have any escapist quality to it, despite being a Space Opera. It is touted as a character study, but the characters aren’t all that fleshed out either. Again, different strokes for different folks, and the very things that I found mundane in this book could well be the things that appeal to you as reader.
So, in summary, if you want to read a book about some folks sitting around chatting and going about their everyday business mostly just waiting for the big thing to happen, this is the book for you. It is a unique approach, I suppose, and based on the general response to the novel (and particularly the series) it seems to have had a positive reception. I have found, though, that whenever the majority seems to enjoy something a lot, I inevitably don’t like it all that much.
I am giving it two stars though, because I did finish it, and there were some OK bits. It is possible I am just not the target market for this. Maybe it is a young adult novel in disguise. Who knows. ...more
Published in 1974, The Centauri Device purposely subverts just about every (at the time) Space Opera trope. It still packs a punch, almost half a centPublished in 1974, The Centauri Device purposely subverts just about every (at the time) Space Opera trope. It still packs a punch, almost half a century later.
I can see, just from the reviews here, that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And isn’t that just marvelous?
The prose is deliriously (and, arguably, divisively grandiose), with much use of both metaphor and simile. I found it positively exhilarating, and arresting. Occasionally abstract, I felt the novel to be extremely visual and atmospheric, although often in somewhat grotesque fashion; a bit like reading a futuristic fever dream in which both Tim Burton and H.R. Giger had a hand (but that could be my own interpretation). I haven’t read other books by this author, so I don’t know whether the prose is specific to this novel, or representative of style.
A blue-grey waxy light drowned her pentacular command-bridge, running like tepid fire down the slippery perspectives of an extraGalactic geometry, forming optical verglas on planes of alien metalwork, tracing the formal interlacing designs that covered the inner hull. Every four or five seconds, banks of stroboscopic lamps fired off, freezing and quantifying jagged areas of shadow, but defining no shape the eye could appreciate. Nothing was perpendicular or dependable. Now white and dazzling, now hard black silhouettes, the quarterdeck crew moved at ease through this disjointed medium, tending the bizarre original equipment of the ship or settling like insects among more identifiable machinery bolted roughly to the deck. They trailed loops of cable from portable computing facilities, calling off queries and co-ordinates in a rising chant. A subsonic ground bass reverberated through the body cavities; other voices chattered and decayed in the foreground like the cries of autistic children heard in a dream.
This future is bleak as hell, and nihilistic in the extreme. Again, it has been done since, and taken even further, but this seems to have been the precursor right here. Harrison has the “Used Future” concept down pat. Everything here is rough around the edges, and evokes that gritty realism of the “new space opera” that followed. This is a galaxy that has gone to seed, populated with all kinds of dregs. The backdrop is quite impressive, filled with industrial detritus and all kinds of big junk. The Centauri Device apparently had a big influence on the likes of Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks, which actually makes a lot of sense.
Outside the gate, the androgynous whores of Golgotha crowded about him as he went, like subtly depraved children: all chemise and mutated orchids and their heads bobbing no higher than his waist, calling to him in soft, empty voices. Their minute hands plucked at his legs as he passed; some made offers of muted obscenity, others sang or raised their arms to be picked up, many simply clutched his hand and stared with ultimate cryptic promise. They flowed like a grey stream down the boulevards of the native quarter, sometimes leading him, sometimes following, all the while smiling seriously as though reflecting all acute desires.
Instead of a hero, The Centauri Device features an anti-hero that has almost no impact on the plot at large (such as it is). The protagonist is swept up in events that he hardly understands, and as such, the reader doesn’t have too much of an idea what is going on either, for large portions of the book. That said, it is not a particularly long book and I charged through it in no time (couldn’t put it down).
Chuck in a big old “bet you didn’t see that coming” ending, and Bob’s your uncle. All-in-all an occasionally bizarre, always eerie, book that I enjoyed more than I had any right to (I suppose). ...more
I'm giving this four stars, but it's a bit of a roller coaster ride. As per another reviewer here on Goodreads, I also fluctuated between feeling (verI'm giving this four stars, but it's a bit of a roller coaster ride. As per another reviewer here on Goodreads, I also fluctuated between feeling (very) annoyed and feeling (very) impressed. The opening chapters are especially challenging, since you may mistake some of what the author is depicting as just so much pretentious made up nonsense, but as the story progresses it starts making a lot more sense.
In the end it is actually a clever story that takes place in a unique and unconventional setting (I suppose part of the issue is unconsciously trying to superimpose the standard conventions over the events taking place here). Despite a ludicrous body count and some rather grotesque (but morbidly fascinating) scenes, the focus is on intrigue. I did deduce some of what was going on based on the title of the novel, but there are still enough twists and reveals to keep things interesting.
In summary: I probably haven't read anything quite like this before, where the physics of a universe, so to speak, is driven / determined by "doctrine" (which is essentially a mixture of a belief, political and mathematical system). But hell, it could also be that I completely misunderstood what the author is depicting here. It's such a unique approach, and I am not scientifically schooled, so who knows.
Challenging, but recommended (even if only for its novelty value). I suppose the real question here is whether I will continue with the series (there are sequels, and all of the books have consistently been nominated for awards). The verdict is still out on that. ...more
Softly, barely audible at first, the strains of the ancient song of evening and requiem swelled to the final poignant measure until black space itselfSoftly, barely audible at first, the strains of the ancient song of evening and requiem swelled to the final poignant measure until black space itself echoed back the sound of the song the ship sang.
This must have been quite novel at the time, all things considered. There had been examples of self-aware ships earlier, but not necessarily dealing with quite the same principle as here. XH-834 is not an Artificial Intelligence, but a human being with a ship for a body (in a manner of speaking). From what I can ascertain, it is more than just a brain being linked into an interface, as well. In fact, it seems that the entire body is encased in a titanium life support shell, even though these ships are called “brainships”.
The Ship Who Sang deals with Helva, who is born with severe disabilities. In the future society where this story takes place, this leaves her parents with two options: euthanasia or allowing her to become a “shell person” (which entails a special regime of surgery and bio-mechanical fiddling (duh) as well as intense psychological training as she “grows up”). Helva eventually becomes a space ship (shell people can become any number of things). This kind of thing obviously represents a lot of investment on behalf of the powers that be, so Helva has to perform services for the Central Worlds until she can buy out her contract (shell people can earn commissions etc just like anybody else).
The Ship Who Sang is a fix-up novel, dealing with Helva’s relationship with a number of pilots (called brawns) who work with her on different assignments. I found the assignments mostly unremarkable (with one particular exception, dealing with a rogue brainship), but it is obvious that the book is concerned with the relationships between the ship and her pilots, and the psychological and ethical ramifications of the whole concept, and not so much with the plot. Just how successful the story is will be up to the response of different readers. I quite liked it, although it took me a little longer to read than I expected (it only has about 200-odd pages, but it felt deceptively dense for some reason).
Despite some inevitable melancholia / poignancy (given the themes explored), in the end the book is fairly optimistic, and I think the author tied things up nicely (taking into account the first and final sequences here, which brings the story full circle). ...more
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