Robert L. Forward's DRAGON'S EGG (Narr by Todd McLaren)

One of the extra and unintended joys of reading vintage/older science fiction (in the case of Dragon's Egg, physicist Robert L. Forward's fiction debut, dating to 1980) is, when one sees a particularly egregious forecasting error on the part of the only kind of author whom the reading public routinely expects to predict the future, imagining what would have to have happened, to have always been true, for one of a novel's more noticeable conceits to be plausible. 

In the case of Dragon's Egg, for instance, the Soviet Union and the Cold War are both still very much real and unignorable facts in its fictional 2020 -- but that's not the interesting thing to think about really, at all, at least as far as this novel is concerned: the Iron Curtain is treated as a throwaway bit of background noise in the idle thoughts of a character and that's pretty much that. 

But what is interesting to think about in terms of this novel and how it differs from our reality is its assumption that the early economic and, possibly, physical realities of how digital computing power is allocated, used and accounted for would have continued to very much resemble how such matters were understood and employed in the earliest days of electronic computing. 

In Forward's 2020, we can't be sure that computers haven't gotten much smaller than the enormous room fillers of the 1960s and 70s, but it is a fact integral to the earliest developments of Dragon's Egg's plot that computer time is expensive and thus must be rigidly controlled and accounted for, to the degree where, as we first come to meet our first point of view character, Jacqueline, the completion of her doctoral thesis research is suddenly threatened by the international currency markets! Her advisor is Russian and his work is funded by his government, his lab's computer time paid for in rubles. If the value of the ruble suddenly plummets, its purchasing power does, too, and so the amount of computer time budgeted for a given piece of research shrinks unless a fresh infusion of rubles is diverted toward that resource.

We can smile indulgently at this notion, of course, treat it as a quaint aspect of a novel written just before most of us had ever heard of Moore's Law, but is it really that goofy? We consider computing power to have gotten cheaper, but I suspect that most of us who think that don't consider much beyond the cost of the materials that make up the machines. As chips got smaller, they required less stuff to manufacture, so of course they got cheaper, but did they? How many rare earth elements went into the IBM behemoths from the punch cards days versus the nosy little snoop machine broadcasting all of your data from your pocket? And what are the environmental costs of acquiring the materials in such a manner as to keep them cheap? How many workers in the supply chain are barely making a living wage? To say nothing of the energy consumed in mining, manufacturing, shipping, marketing and then finally running your jeejahs?*

What if Forward's alternate 2020 is just as technologically sophisticated as ours but is more upfront and honest about the tech's actual cost and makes everybody involved actually pay their fair share to employ it? Then it's not so very inaccurate about the actual 21st century as we might have first assumed, eh? See, this is way more fun than just pointing and laughing at how William Gibson didn't anticipate cell phones or whatever.

But now I'm way out in the weeds as far as this novel is concerned, which is not about economics or social justice or the evolution of the tech sector, but about an exceptionally cool and fairly uncommon idea or set of ideas about what space aliens might actually be like!

Spoiler: they're really, really not like us, and they're really, really not that easy to think about. We're in Greg "Clockwork Rocket" Egan and Neal "Anathem" Stephenson and Peter "Blindsight" Watts territory, here. As in hard science fiction, but hard science fiction that is a lot more than "we're going to throw orbital mechanics or fuel calculations or subatomic particle physics at you for a few hundred pages so you don't notice that it's really just cowboys and injuns in spaaaaaace."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Anyway, Jacqueline's work employs a space probe that is humanity's first to travel orthogonal to the elliptic of our solar system, meaning that, if we regard the sun and its planets and other rocks and clots of stuff as all on one flat plane, as we do, this is our first probe that has gone up "above" it to examine it from the new angles that position affords. The Sun presents a whole new face to us when viewed from there, for instance. 

While Jacqueline is looking, not so much at images as at the kind of massive streams of raw data that NASA and Co. use to generate those (simulated and cosmetically enhanced) images, she has found some weird distortions in the numbers. And, because she is brilliant (but also pretty, slim, young and French), she manages to commandeer the probe to take a closer look and maybe determine what's really going on up/out there. 

And before you can say Big Ben, Jacqueline and her new friend/admirer Donald have found that there's a pulsar plowing through our neighborhood!

But wait, there's more!

Honestly, I can understand where a lot of readers would be all but tapping their feet and checking their phones with increasing frequency through these early chapters, but I would have been perfectly happy with this stuff as the whole novel. I am a scientific washout as a person, having flamed out in grad school because I kept getting distracted by various opportunities to learn new languages (which should have been my course of study in graduate school, but was not), but I still absolutely love the kind of minutiae of discovery described here, the process of applying reason and precedent and new intuition to the interpretation of the massive dumps of indirect data that we use to make up for the vast inadequacies of our own evolved kluges we call our senses. Like, we can't see, for instance, X-rays, but we can cobble together machinery that measures them anyway and work from the numbers that generates to concoct an approximation of what it would be like if we could see them, and then monitor changes in that approximation and extrapolate from that more about the nature of other things we can't "see" and build up a considerable body of pretty good information about the rest of the world we can't directly perceive. And from that we can sometimes manipulate these unseen things into doing work for us or answering questions like "Is this lady's collarbone broken?" or "Does that star that is so far away from us that we're actually only seeing what it looked like thousands of years ago, have some planets orbiting it? Planets like ours?"

I mean, come on!

Interconnected between the chapters detailing the discovery of the pulsar and, as the novel's time frame races ahead, the arrival of a crewed spaceship in orbit around the pulsar waiting for robots to build the infrastructure that will allow the crew (including a son of Jacqueline's named Pierre) to explore its mysteries, are chapters that give us glimpses of another community. At first they seem very like us and to inhabit a world like ours, as a point of view character tries to catch a swift. It's only after we've enjoyed a few moments of failed swift-catching efforts that we discover that the swift is not a pretty little bird flying around, and that our new character has a body even less like ours than the swift's is like a specimen of  Apus apus! We're not in Kansas anymore; our guy has many more eyes than you or I do, and has a much more protean body. Oho!

As more chapters unfold, we watch this other population develop culturally through the discovery of things like agriculture, and mathematics and optics, and begin to cultivate a much more sophisticated understanding of their world and how it works, through processes of investigation and discovery that are as enjoyable to observe as Jacqueline's and Donald's have been. Forward shows here a talent for speculative biology, sociology and, yes, physics that I would compare to many better known writers.

Here I'm going to digress again, because while I'm never one to scream about spoilers and would remind my readers once again that this here blog carries a "ware spoilers" up there in its header, but man, this novel would have been even more fun if the jacket copy didn't give away the nature of this other community, so that I didn't know in advance how these two narratives actually fit together. I would love to have been surprised by the answer, so I'm not going to spoil it for you, either. And if this post has already made you think about grabbing a copy of this to enjoy, I'd urge you to do your best to avoid the blurbs and marketing copy so that you can enjoy the discovery the way that I think Forward actually intended you to. I mean, it's still great anyway, but file this story's secrets under "would have been more fun to uncover alongside the characters instead of just getting to watch them figure out what we already know." Le sigh.

And now, excuse me. There is a sequel to this called Starquake, but it appears to be out of print, or at least not yet published in digital form. But hey, I've been looking for an excuse to visit my local used paperback store again anyway!

*By the way, though, even this point about allocating scarce resources vis a vis scientific research isn't necessarily all that retro-anachronistic, because Jacqueline's work doesn't just require computational power but also employs one of six existing-in-her-universe X-Ray telescopes. I'm sure that, even in that age which Forward depicts as even less interested in astronomical observation and study than our actual 2020s are, there are probably lots of graduate student types and senior scientists, too, jockeying for telescope time, just as they are in our world. 

Neal Stephenson's SEVENEVES

Neal Stephenson has never disappointed me, but he sure has tried my patience, and that has never been more true than with his 2015 time sink, Seveneves, which novel I have had on Mount TBR since it was published but always kept misreading the title of. Lots and lots of sexy things distracted me from a big ol' chunk of text called Seveneyes.

I finally got around to it this winter, in audio book form, narrated in part by one Mary Robinette Kowal and while I know she wasn't chairing giant international genre conventions back then, I still wonder how in the world she found the time to record all of this audio, to say nothing of rehearsing it, figuring out how she was going to handle character voices* and mastering more technobabble (albeit probably 100% scientifically accurate, because this is Neal Stephenson) than Stephenson has thrown at us to date** all while writing, rewriting, editing, promoting and narrating her own books. I mean, wow.

At bottom, Seveneves, the first third or so anyway, is a generation ship story, with a twist, in that the ship doesn't go very far away from its point of origin. 

Disaster has struck and is going to keep on striking for thousands of years and the good old blue marble of Earth will be uninhabitable long before those thousands of years are up. Humanity has been caught napping, in that it doesn't have any other stores of DNA in the solar system yet, as in nope, no colonies on the Moon (heh), not Mars, nobody in the asteroid belt, nothing but the good old International Space Station and a bunch of satellites and whatnot in orbit around the good old blue marble that's soon gonna be a good old red marble and look a bit bigger, but there was a very small window of time between the original disaster and the level of recurring disaster that means the end of the world as we know it, so humanity realized it had two options for survival: burrow deep underground and hope to survive as a subterranean population, or expand our presence in orbit. As things progress, some half-assed individual effort is done off-page about trying for the first, but Seveneves is about the second: expanding our presence in orbit, by expanding the International Space Station itself and also building a distributed swarm of little space-arks, holding like four or five people each, set up with basic life support and some possible capacity for growing algae for food and oxygen and whatnot. The "Arklets," as they come to be known, are thus not meant as individual arks but as parts of a scattered whole held together by the power of computation and based around the ISS, which is nicknamed Izzy. It's a cool and highly plausible scenario that I've not seen a lot of yet, so this is more than enough to grab and hold my interest, but...

Of necessity, when something is scientifically plausible, and being imagined by a writer like Neal Stephenson, there's going to be more passages explaining more math and science than most people are ever expected to page through in normal life. But we are Science Fiction Fans and normal standards do not apply, am I right?

But still, for every line of dialogue or description of actual things happening, there's about a paragraph of background information to put the dialogue or happenings in context, and I cannot advocate for its exclusion or reduction but, golly.

As you might expect, most of the characters are scientists, and they are unquestionably heroic as they get problem after problem thrown at them: how much can the ISS be modified and how can it be accomplished; how much raw material is needed to build how many Arklets and how fast can we get them made; who gets to fly on those Arklets; who gets to live on the ISS after all the Arklets are up and the Earth has gone from blue marble to red fireball; how can we keep everybody breathing and eating and pooping and not getting cancer from cosmic rays; how are we gonna keep everybody from going crazy; how are we going to keep everybody safe from micrometeorites and other space hazards; what are we going to do when all the propellant is used up... which of these problems need to be solved first; how many of them can be postponed until later; how can we make sure there is a later in which to solve them; what kind of stuff do we need to focus on making on earth to enhance the Ark Swarm's chances...

All of that is drama enough for a whole novel right there, but that's just one-third of Seveneves. Like my favorite Stephen Baxter novel that I will never read again (Evolution; it's an amazing book but I Just Can't), Seveneves is more interested in what can go wrong *after* the Anthropocene world we know is gone, and wants to extend that after way farther than most books do.

Anyway, as you might expect, all of this doesn't leave a lot of room for us to get to know characters beyond what their scientific or sociological specialty is, but Stephenson does at least try. Unusually for him, this time his greatest success at this is with his villain figure, and man, oh, man, in this villain figure and her effects he kind of perfectly prefigured our big socio-political dilemmas in the 2020s because his villain figure (in the first third of the novel) is the abruptly former President of the United States, a woman named Julia Bliss Flaherty (referred to as "JBF" most of the time), and it's a pity she's a cishet woman because she really needed a mustache to twirl. At first she just seems like the kind of tough but charismatic figure we wish we could have voted for in 2016 instead of the the choices we got, and she seems to handle the disaster on her hands with admirable clarity and honor, pushing for an international accord that includes in some of its finer print a very firm declaration that World Leaders Are Not Allowed On The Ark but hoo dogies, look at that: the very first major hazard post-red marble is an unexpected hunk of metal sort of lurching around in the middle of the ark swarm, causing near collisions and scrambling the algorithms that govern the swarm almost to the point of not being able to govern the swarm and who do you think is inside that hunk of metal? Armed with a gun, aka the single worst thing to have in an outer space scenario? 

Yeah.

And JBF still thinks she's in charge of everything, despite not understanding anything except how to convince people she is in charge. And when she finds out she isn't in charge anymore, instead of accepting things as they are and just being grateful there was a Swarm for her to illegally escape to and looking for a way to maybe actually be useful in the Roslin mode***, she almost immediately starts stirring up shit and honestly, I was bracing myself for her to start convincing people that spacesuits aren't necessary, that's just a lie told by Big Spacesuit to keep us all dependent on them, man. But what she does is almost as bad.

Mary Robinette Kowal, by the way, had *way* too much fun delivering JBF's lines, which without exception made me want to reach through my soundbar and knock out some teeth or something.

JBF's presence in the Swarm puts the reader in an interesting and uncomfortable position. While she is shit-stirring, the person whom the governing bodies of the Earth actually did put in charge, a German scientist, has had to declare what amounts to martial law in the days immediately following the complete destruction of everything left on Earth, because in the early days of a disaster cooperation is more important than feelings even when the conditions are not as extreme as they are when there's just a few millimeters of metal between the people with feelings and hard vaccuum and the feelings are every human left alive (amounting to just over a thousand; almost exactly the size of my little hometown) mourning the billions of dead left behind. The realities of physics and biology give compelling reasons to demand the kind of control that is established in these early days (as all the former goverments and the scientific community of Old Earth understood and codified in the Swarm's constitution) and the reader's rooting interest is thus pulled toward the side of the tightly-controlled soft martial law society the German and the rest of the scientists aboard the ISS have established, at least temporarily.  Which, look, it feels really, really weird in January of 2022, just a few days after the first anniversary of the biggest coup attempt in American history, which aimed to establish a right-wing authoritarian government in place of the pluralism we've always strived for, to be rooting for the authoritarians and against the people who are opposing it and claiming that the majority of the population is not getting its fair say in decision making, OK?

Dammit, Neal!

But all of this is just build-up, really, to the big question that Stephenson wants to pose to us. Uh, big spoilers ahead for this seven year old book, Seveneves (whoa).

All that prologue just explains how a genetic bottleneck comes to be. And it's a hell of a bottleneck. Break the book's title into two words: Seven Eves. That's right, the human race gets narrowed down to just seven fertile women, heiresses to the failures of every attempt to establish genetic diversity in whatever version of the human race survives to recolonize a future Earth.**** Fortunately they still have the equipment and the know-how to use it to create children via parthenogenesis. But wait, there's more. Because the know-how and equipment also come with the ability to screen for the kind of genetic disorders that become such a big problem when a population gets inbred, screen for and correct it. Like, way beyond CRISPR, or at least CRISPR plus a lot more specific knowledge about the human genome and how it's expressed in bodies than we have now.

But so then, what do we want to screen for and eliminate from the future human race, ladies? What heritable medical conditions count as diseases and what are just traits? What about mental illnesses? What about the autism spectrum? What about hairiness? And what genetic babies are we willing to throw out with the genetic bathwater, given how little we still understand about what genes code for what traits -- but we do know that it's not a simple one gene to one trait ratio there, and what if it turns out a gene for an undesirable thing is also linked to a desirable thing or carries the potential to develop a favorable trait in a future environment that we just haven't imagined yet?

These questions matter a lot to me as I continue to cope with one of those disorders that has both a genetic and an environmental component but may also be related to exposure to viruses. It's left me semi-crippled and, due to a whole passel of medication allergies, unable to do much about it and so virtually unemployable. The Nazis would definitely have euthanized me. I'm sure a lot of my neighbors in a blood red state will be eager to do so if certain scenarios they dream about come to pass and that sort of thing becomes possible and acceptable again (which, it kind of already is, as any casual look at what horror stories the disabled community routinely share online about dealing with the U.S. healthcare system, insurance companies, physicians who are trained to blame patients for all of their problems especially if they're fat, etc.). But the genetic component is actually a very common one in the Northern European gene pool and has persisted for so many generations. It must have some survival value, not to have been eliminated long ago by Natural Selection, right? Yet here I sit, reaching for my cane to go back to bed to try to get some sleep after having been wakened in the middle of the night like I always am when the one weak-ass pain medicine that doesn't make me projectile vomit or go straight into anaphylactic shock wears off and all the joints in my body take turns setting off the kind of alarm bells that are really kind of meant for only the dire injuries like a limb having been hacked off or crushed, but in my body just means "hey, we're still alive, I guess."

But I digress.

But so, you can see why that scene smack dab in the middle of the book where seven women have the power and responsibility of deciding what genes the future human race can and can't have but only the really bitchy psychotic cannibal (who just sort of appears in this part of the story but whose back story I really wish I could have gotten in at least as much detail as I got about the evolution of Every Kind of Robot) among them is really making any argument about how maybe some genes we think are bad because of how they're expressed now might not be bad in future scenarios and how it's the potential for new combinations that's the important thing we are going for in trying to assure genetic diversity in the first place and...?

Egads. I listen to a lot of audio books when my body won't let me sleep. Usually I catch myself drifting off, rewind about 15 minutes or so to reset the bookmark, and turn over to conk out for a while. But ending Part 2 of the audio book on that note, that scene, had me lying miserably awake the rest of the night just appalled and terrified and unable to get the scene out of my head.

That's a new achievement for Neal Stephenson, in my personal experience anyway. I mean, bee tee dubs, I had already been up way past my (gigglesnort) bedtime just listening because, you know, the book has lots of good stuff in it and I wanted to find out what was going to happen next and stuff.

Unfortunately, what I most wanted to see as far as what was going to happen next and stuff takes place off the pages. While I am no stranger to and sometimes a fan of books that stretch out over eons of time a la Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, a 5000-year-leap between the Meeting of the Seven Eves and the next section of the book robbed me of what I'd really been looking forward to: seeing how these seven women (actually eight, but one of the eight survivors of the Swarm was already past menopause) would rebuild a whole civilization from the products of their own wombs and the genetics lab. We get glimpses of this in the form of flashbacks, but not nearly enough and I spent a good part of the last third of the novel, one big undifferentiated mass (even moreso in audio book form, in which it's a 10+ hour slog of a "chapter" simply called "Five Thousand Years Later", narrated by drowsy-voiced Will Damron instead of Kowal), resenting that Stephenson had skipped the most interesting thing in the book.

But Stephenson was more interested in extrapolating what humanity would be like divided into seven "races" according to the heredities established for them by the Seven Eves, and, of course, Neal gotta Neal, in describing in minute detail all of the fancy futuristic technology these races develop for living and thriving in space and for slowly recolonizing the Earth.

But about these "races"... The descendants of JBF and a nasty piece of work who is the only other survivor of JBF's dumbest plan named Aida are basically in a cold war with all of the other kin-groups, 3 billion strong after 5000 years and living in Stephenson's version of Alastair Reynold's famous Glitter Band -- a ring of habitat satellites circling the Earth, waiting for it to become habitable again. The "Julians" and "Aidans" have dominion in about 1/4 to 1/3 of the habitats, conveniently contiguous, while the "Moirans" and "Teklans"**** and "Dinans" and "Kamalans" (or whatever her descendants are called; rotten thing about audio books is you don't see how names are spelled) and "Ivans" try to give them a wide berth but now that Earth is almost ready for resettlement, the question basically becomes just how much of humankind's worst ideas and tendencies are going to accompany it back down the gravity well.

But really? If I wanted to re-read Clans of the Alaphane Moon, I would just do that, am I right? 

At least there's some neato technology to enjoy, like gliders that are basically inflatable suits that ride the thermals up to "hangars" in the upper atmosphere that lift passengers up into orbit without burning any chemical or nuclear fuel, to say nothing of giant orbital habitats that can house, e.g. complete ecosystems including things like 800 year old fir trees. I mean, this is the future we want, kind of? Maybe? Except for all the dumb factionalism, which I thought is what the original Seven Eves really meant to do away with, didn't they? Or did they?

Oh, and there's kind of a plot to this last section, involving the assembling of a working group including one member of each race, to take on a mission that is kept secret from them and us for far too long; by the time the characters found out what they have been sent to earth to do (it involves problems that have arisen since bands of "Sooners" jumped the gun on resettling the earth and the discovery that some of the undergrounders survived and have their own ideas about who should get to do what with New Earth and zzzz) I really didn't care. I came very close to not finishing this one, my friends. I really liked the first two-thirds but this last part couldn't end fast enough for me. If had been anyone but Stephenson, I probably would have just marked this DNF. The sunk cost fallacy is losing its hold over me as I age, but it's Neal Stephenson, man! He's never let me down!

Except, he almost did. To the point where I kind of want to give the Battlestar Galactica advice to anyone considering reading this who hasn't yet. Stop when you hit "Five Thousand Years Later." Like with BSG, you'll feel this is a horrible thing to do and you'll be so curious about how all of this is going to end but just let your own imagination end it for you instead. Stop watching BSG after the first half of season three; stop reading Seveneves after the Council of the Seven Eves. Maybe even just before the Council. You'll have enjoyed two-third of a terrific story without losing your faith in the guy what made it.

*About which, sigh. While not quite as irritating as when male narrators put on a breathy falsetto for female characters and make them all sound like Bambi the Big Busted Brainless Blue-eyed Bimbo, the reverse strategy of Elizabeth Holmes-ing it up is pretty damned close, and sounds painful. I wish more narrators would just let the dialogue and its tags do the job -- and that their producers/directors/etc would let them. It would be fine, really. As long as the author did their job.

**I haven't read his new book yet, either, so I may be wrong.

***For those who don't click through and haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin is a head of civilian government on a space fleet who, when a new planet is settled by its population, steps down and resumes her original work as a schoolteacher.

****And oh, get this: Moirans and Teclans are understood to share a special bond because the original Moira and the original Tecla were lovers. That's right. Five thousand years later, we're to understand that generations and generations of a couple's parthenogenic children are still mostly attracted to one another. Eyeroll.

****And holy mother of fuck, I wonder if Neal Stephenson is a Gene Wolfe fan because wouldn't this be a bang-up prequel to the Solar Cycle?

Chris Farnell's FERMI'S PROGRESS Quartet

Imagine a cool, well-appointed, fairly advanced-compared-to-what-we-have-now spaceship. Something like, say, the good old Starship Enterprise, its five year mission to explore strange new worlds etc., etc. Only with a much, much smaller crew. And that crew consists of Arnold Schwarzenegger's and Danny DeVito's characters from Ivan Reitman's Twins (1988), a billionaire (yeah, this isn't the Star Trek universe's post scarcity economy, nor is it that far into the future; Donald Trump is still something about which our heroes are embarrassed) and a subcontinental Indian trans woman who is a hell of an engineer. There will be a bit more crew as we go, but to start up, that's it.

Sounds like a bit of a good time but nothing like a good time that we haven't already had before over the last fifty years or so. It must be a pretty good time since we've been having it and coming back to it for fifty years or so, but still. Ho, hum.

Except this groovy spaceship, built by a somewhat deranged supergenius completely on the sly in the late 1970s but only brought to life and readied for its maiden voyage twenty minutes into our future, is powered by something even worse than nuclear bombs, something nobody really understands that well but does, in fact, give humanity the hope, and the reality, of faster-than-light travel. Except that part about nobody understanding it that well? Not the mad scientist who originally built it, and not the trans woman engineer, whose name is Rajita, and oh no, there's nobody else to consult about it because...

Because as soon as its engine is fired up for the very first time, it completely destroys not our good old planet Earth but also its entire solar system. Right on its first test run, which was supposed to be a quick trip to another nearby system with a few potentially habitable exoplanets that humanity could some day spread out to and colonize let's go make a quick jaunt and see if they're really going to be suitable for that except NO. Well, yes, but no. No more need to find additional homes for humanity because there's no more humanity. Or elephants. Or mosquitos. Or cockroaches, Or coronaviruses. Or rocks. Or water. Or atoms. 

Nothing left to save except four human beings who were heading out on a little shakedown cruise.

And no, this is not a spoiler; it's the entire premise of this quartet of novellas, as the jacket copy says. What if the Enterprise was a giant unstoppable genocide machine but instead of a steady and capable Archer/Pike/Kirk/Picard/Sisko/Janeway/Georgiu/Saru/Killy, there's twin brothers Samson (Schwarzenegger, the twin who got shot up with the supersoldier serum, the top notch education, the optimal nutrition program, etc.) and Connor (Devito, the Control) (Oh, and both of them are the biological sons of the mad scientist, who was a barely-reconstructed Nazi and thus obsessed with genetics and might have left booby traps on the ship that can only be disarmed by people who share his DNA), the aforementioned Rajita, and Liz Gordon, the billionaire tech sis who rounded up this crew and provided the impetus to take the Fermi out of orbital mothballs and see what it could do. They don't know each other all that well -- even the brothers are barely acquainted, as they weren't raised together because Connor was the Control, yannow -- were not selected for optimal compatibility or skill sets or psychological fitness to go out into deep space and certainly weren't in any way prepared to deal with the fact that, oopsie daisy, they just killed billions and billions of humans, exterminated, possibly, all of the other life in the universe and also wrecked any chance of a resupply on food, water, oxygen, coffee, clean underwear...

So yeah, these stories have as dark an undertone as you could ask for right from the get go. And what author Chris Farnell has decided to do with them makes them even darker, but also occasionally strangely breezy and even fun -- and that's despite, not because of, the quippiness of a lot of the dialogue. Always with the wise cracks and the odd pop culture reference, these four. But wait! There's more!

The first novella, Dyson's Fear (brillant title), is also structurally the most interesting, as it jumps about through time, playing out events before and after the Fermi's fatal launch. Each chapter is located in time relative to that launch, so some things are described as taking place several hundred days "before you die" and others up to 32 days "after you died" -- when the crew of the Fermi arrive in that solar system they'd planned to peek in on. Only our data on it was way out of date because even the speed of light isn't that fast on the scale of galaxies, amirite? 

What they find is not a star and its orbiting planets and assorted debris, but a Dyson sphere - an artificial structure that completely encompasses the star, capturing all of that star's energy and diverting it to some dedicated purpose quite alien to whatever the star might think its purpose is. Usually as we imagine it, it's a kind of mega-habitat, which turns out to be the case here as the Fermi slows down and docks with it, with Samson, Connor and Gordon forming humanity's first ever away team. A very, very flawed away team. They have entertaining and engaging adventures within the sphere, seeking out new life and new civilizations that fortunately have already invented the Universal Translator, but meanwhile, back on the Fermi Rajita has company in the form of a robot avatar of the artificial intelligence that created and runs the Dyson sphere and together they discover that umm hurry up guys get back on the ship because it's going to power up again and do the same thing it did to our good old solar system really damned soon!

And so as the second novella, Descartesmageddon, starts up, the crew has grown by one as the robot avatar of the Dyson sphere, which calls itself World, has uploaded as much of its solar system-sized mind into the robot to survive the destruction of its grand creation, and everybody now has two unbelievably-scaled acts of accidental genocide on their consciences. On World's wise advice, they've set course for a completely empty bit of space so they can't accidentally destroy another entire system, but of course that goes wrong and they find themselves in orbit around a fascinating, richly described and downright bizarre new planet they are now an existential threat to, but need to visit because they're running out of food and oh, look, this one is at the tail end of a zombie apocalypse! As they take up orbit, Rajita reveals that after the scrapes the away team got into last time, she's turned the Fermi's bank of 3D printers to making guns, and after a bleakly entertaining discussion about the morality of going into the arms dealing racket (it's all they've got to trade for food) as their second foray into first contact, down they go.

What happens planetside is exciting, challenging and poses even more of an ethical/philosophical head-scratcher than Dyson's Fear did, for the zombies on this hellish-looking world aren't your typical shamblers moaning for braaaaaaains; they're Cartesian zombies. And aliens. They're Cartesian zombie aliens. But, just like the good old zombie plagues of a thousand movies and novels before it, the zombie state is contagious. And jumps the species gap. Or does it?

This adventure leaves lasting impacts on the crew and its group cohesion, as Rajita in particular winds up bonding with a group of natives on this latest world in a way that suggests her neurodivergence has clicked with other individuals in a way she hasn't before, giving Descartesmageddon an emotional resonance that the previous novella lacked and that we don't see again really in the rest of the series. But that's all star systems blown up under the bridge. Or something.

With yet another systemicide under their belts and some new passengers, if not yet crewmates, in tow, the Fermi's next port of call is one of the most unusual alien worlds I've encountered in fiction; the civilization the crew meets are all in some way involved, as the title Planet of the Apiaries indicates, in beekeeping. But not in the way you're thinking, cute in their outfits and screen-hats frolicking with screens full of honeycombs in their backyards; these bees are gigantic, and they don't make honey, they make starship fuel. Which the Fermi needs if its to continue on its destructive way (it's established early on in the series that stopping the Fermi would be even worse than letting it rampage through the universe). Oh, and these aliens? Communicate via body language or dance (like bees!) and their names all denote some kind of idiosyncratic hand position or gesture. Love it!*

The narrative that results here is an intricate Rube-Goldberg plot of escapes that use all three dimensions and then pit the crew against a new kind of alien that, even more than the Cartesian zombies of the previous world, turns our friends' neurological weaknesses against them, which allows the introduction of entire new characters that have always been there but the crew -- and we -- forgot them, or never noticed them, or never noticed that we'd forgotten them, because aliens can hijack our own neurological weaknesses now. Do these novellas keep getting better? They keep getting better, and this one ends on an existential/philosophical cliffhanger that manages to make the progress of a star system-destroying ship even more of an ethical dilemma than it already was, but also gives our crew a purpose they've been starting to lack as we start into The Phone Job.

The Phone Job starts us off by passing through several new systems that offer tantalizing delights that any space Stephen Maturin would be screaming in frustration not to get to explore -- right before they are annihilated, maintaining the series' incredibly dark tone even as we see the crew have found a new diversion in the form of tossing a rubber ball and letting it progress through the entire torus of their ship before returning to the thrower, who just has to turn 180 degrees to catch their own throw. I mean, how would you take your mind off things? Watch TV? And know that every person involved in the making of that show is dead and so are all the other things you're seeing on the screen and even that city they're in and even that country, that continent, that entire planet, that entire solar system? I'd probably mostly throw a ball around, too.

Except Liz Gordon, Gordon gotta Gordon, and even though the World has near-infinite processing power and knowledge and hasn't been able to find the source of the revelation that ended Planet of the Apiaries (which, by the way, came via goofball Connor's insight, because he's only dumb compared to Samson, remember), Gordon thinks she can find what the World cannot, namely the bit of computer code they have to change to stop their never-ending death parade. Preferably before she has to open their last tin of coffee.

And then the Fermi brings them all to the most inhabited system yet, and it's one where Liz soon feels right at home: the headquarters of the Greater Galactic Commercial Network. That's right, there finally is an interstellar empire, and it's captialist AF, baby!

And the GGCN possesses technology that can maybe put a stop to the Fermi's interstellar murder spree! But capitalism, so Gordon and goofball Connor, natural enemies as they've proven to be, have to team up to bilk -- err, trade -- to get that technology. You'd think they'd have a pat hand with their monopoly on faster-than-light travel but not with those two playing it...

While, as with the rest of the novellas in the series, everything comes together in the end (Farnell is very good with complicated-yet-tight plots), and we do get something like closure, I'm also delighted to discover that at some point in the future we're going to get more Progress out of Fermi.

See what I did there? Eh? Eh?

*Really, this world is kind of an inside-out version of Clark Thomas Carleton's wonderful Antasy trilogy, in which humans have evolved into tiny, tiny beings perfectly sized to ride insects like warhorses, share anthills with various ant species, use locusts as planes in their air force, and adopt many of their domesticated arthopod pals' other traits just to survive. It's the coolest idea for a fantasy series, maybe ever (and no, it's not just Dune with Literal Insects, although of course it is a lot Dune with Literal Insects)! The third volume of which just dropped late last month and I'll be buzzing about very, very soon.

 

James S.A. Corey's CIBOLA BURN

"Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet." -- James Holden

After three novels taking place inside asteroids and moons and space stations and vast bizarre alien artifacts, and aboard spaceships plying the void between all of these things, at last we come to the surface of what most people would think of as a planet. There's breathable atmosphere, sort-of-normal gravity, a close-to-normal day/night cycle, something like plants and animals, and even buildings and food.

Only it's not Earth. Or Mars. Or something settled via a generation ship like the Mormons were building in the first Expanse novel. Oh, no.

It's in another star system altogether. Only we don't really know how far away it is. Or how the technology that gets us there works.

So now we're sort of in Frederick "Heechee" Pohl territory as events unfold in Cibola Burn, the fourth Expanse novel by the two-headed alien we call James S.A. Corey. And we have the protomolecule that has wreaked havoc in three prior novels back in our good old Sol system to thank for it, but that's all we know; we done passed through the gate that was built for us, but when we got to where it led us, there was nobody home. Ruins that might be described as Lovecraftian if not Cyclopean, yes. Aliens (except for the flora-and-fauna analogs found on the first planet we settle), no.

It's refreshing, this being on a planet business. But lest we think this is just going to be a novel of exploration and discovery... Have you read the other books in this series? Or at least the epigram above? Yeah...

So this planet, called New Terra by the Earth-based corporation that claims to own it but Ilus (as in an early name for the city of Troy) by the people who first settled it* is quite a place, but not a great one for human habitation for all its abundant clean, breathable air and fresh liquid water. The local life forms' biology is incompatible with ours, for a start (much is made early on of bugs that persist in biting people, only to drop dead minutes after feasting on human blood). Crops have to be grown in soil imported from our system, etc. All in all, seems like more trouble than its worth, except for two things: scientific curiosity and mineral wealth in the form of vast and easily mined deposits of lithium (the stuff that makes the batteries in most of our consumer electronics work).

Before you can say "space opera", Ilus is at the center of a major conflict, as the colonists try by various and violent means to fend off the corporate/scientific mission that is just landing there as the novel opens. The colonists don't want to lose their colony; the scientists don't want to lose the opportunity to study a fresh and uncontaminated new ecology (oops); the corporation wants to assert ownership and control.

Ut oh.

Enter the crew of the Rocinante, whom our old friends, UN muckty-muck Crisjen Avasarala and Outer Planets Alliance honcho Fred Johnson, have dispatched to mediate between these parties because Holden is the only moral high-horse riding uncompromising asshat for the job, they both agree. Holden is not thrilled with this, but the protomolecular ghost of [REDACTED] wants him to go, too, and is capable of haunting even Holden's dreams, so yeah, off they go.

All this alone would make for a pretty interesting story, especially with its two new viewpoint characters, colonist-turned-reluctant-terrorist Basia, corporate security dick and former partner of [REDACTED] Havelock, and brilliant biologist Elvi** keeping things interesting, but this is an Expanse novel, so it's never just going to be about human politics. The protomolecule is still very much a thing, and the long-vanished aliens who made the protomolecule also made the gate through which everyone gets to Ilus -- and left a lot of ruins on the planet.

And a lot of stuff inside it as well. Stuff that is triggered by the arrival of Holden and protomolecular puppet [REDACTED].

Cue epic shitstorm eloquently described by Holden above. It's a terrible planet, you guys.

I'll confess to having occasionally been annoyed at some aspects of Cibola Burn, most notably how the vast world of the Expanse still seems to contain a paucity of characters. Did [REDACTED]'s old partner really have to be the guy on the corporate spaceship? Wouldn't it be more probable that an entirely new guy held that role, since there are billions and billions of humans out there now? Of course, by that same argument, mightn't that vast human Expanse also contain someone more qualified and capable than Holden, Amos, Naomi and Alex to handle the powder keg of politics on Ilus? Not that I don't love these guys. It's just getting increasingly less probable that these same four people are at the center of every major develop in human history, over and over again. But I accept that this is a probably a bow to the necessities of series writing; few readers, I expect, would want to read a series that realistically kept throwing new figures into the forefront with every plot development. We read sequels for the characters, most of us, way more than for the world-building. What happens to so-and-so next is more important to us than what happens to all of humanity next. We're just wired that way. Dickens knew this without having been told by science. So do we.

Now the Rocinante and the rest of humanity is poised for yet even more difficulty and adventure. That gateway didn't just offer up Ilus to us, but thousands of other planets. All of which, as Avasarala points out, don't need to be terraformed to be habitable, like poor old Mars. Who's going to want to stay there now that it's so easy to go somewhere with free air and water and shelter from radiation? But then, what happens to Mars' formidable arsenal of heavily armed spaceships and missiles and nukes when there's just a skeleton crew left behind on Mars to govern them and their use? Collapse of the USSR anyone (insert your favorite Red Planet joke here)?

So yes, onward to Nemesis Games very, very soon.

*Who are themselves refugees from the disaster on Ganymede that was the centerpiece of the second Expanse novel, Caliban's War, refugees who were turned away from every human population center they tried to stop and and so finally just sailed on through the gateway and started their own illicit colony on this new planet.

**Which, I've run into a lot of reviews online in which people complain very loudly about Elvi, because she is portrayed as falling hard for Holden and letting it cloud her judgment to a dangerous degree. They don't like that she has this weakness and regard it as regressive and anti-feminist that so much of her story seems to revolve around this. And I can see their point, as I rolled my eyes a bit at her, too (even though she fully recognizes her feelings as dangerously distracting and unprofessional). But I say this rounds her out nicely. AND I'll point out that, as a friend of hers correctly diagnoses, what is really going on isn't that she's fallen in love with Holden, but that she's spent two years on a spaceship without receiving any physical affection (by her choice; she's declined to participate in the partner swapping and teepee creeping behavior of her fellow scientists) before crash-landing on an alien planet just in time for ALL THE CRISES TO HAPPEN and, being a mammal still, what she really needs is some intimate human contact. Which her friend is happy to provide. Which clears her head just in time for her to do the important work, have the important breakthroughs, that basically save the day. In conclusion, I'd like the point out that this is pretty much exactly the same situation Randy Waterhouse finds himself in, in Cryptonomicon, and nobody complained about sexism or stereotypes or regressive gender attitudes in that book.

Paul Elard Cooley's THE BLACK: OUTBREAK

In The Black: A Deep Sea Tale, literary horror author (and good friend of Your Humble Blogger) Paul Elard Cooley sic'd an ancient and mysterious and unique monster on a too-enterprising crew of roughnecks and scientists on an offshore oil rig. In The Black: Arrival, Cooley began exploring the implications of this entity's arrival on the mainland as it wreaked havoc on the testing laboratory to where the first novel's crew sent samples of oil that happened to also contain that entity, which results as harrowing and disastrous as those on the rig.

In this third novel, The Black: Outbreak, Cooley now shows us what happens when the entity, mistakenly treated as a disease organism, becomes the problem of a nearby hospital, the Centers for Disease Control, and members of Houston PD's SWAT. This means the reader is being asked to invest in a whole mess of new characters, and Cooley as usual does a fine job of deftly sketching them in, so a few words conveys a whole lot of information about who we're following through his labyrinth of nasty doom. But we've learned, we have, that more than half of these people are basically just monster chow.

Confession time: I found this one a tough slog compared to the first two. The middle of the book is basically just a long round of set 'em up and knock 'em down, as character after character succumbs to the basically unstoppable Black even as an isolated hero in the CDC mobile command unit finds the entity's weakness. It got a bit repetitive, there for a while, but then the tension (will the (very few) survivors be able to implement the solution in time? Especially since The Black has knocked out all of the hospital's utilities, even unto the backups?) between plight and solution kicked in to regain the book's momentum.

The ending is basically satisfying, even (bizarrely, for a Cooley novel) hopeful, while still setting up another sequel. And this one should have some character continuity, which makes me happy because I've grown attached to a few of the characters in this one.

I'm sure I went regret that at ALL.

James S.A. Corey's ABADDON'S GATE

The Expanse series almost lost me with this one, guys. It took me a whole lot of false starts to get into Abaddon's Gate, the series' third novel, and it was only partly because of the very strong feeling I had from page one that I'd already read a superior version of it written by Alastair Reynolds and intermixed with a lot of other, cooler stuff in the three-and-a-sidequel Revelation Space series.

But the book does have its own charms that eventually became evident to me.

Abaddon's Gate is pretty much just a giant thought experiment in zero gravity combat-and-movement-and-injury-and-recovery-and-pain, wrapped up in a bog standard battle-for-a-territory-in-a-confined-space plot only somewhat enlivened by the circumstances under which said combat and battle are taking place, which, maybe I'll get to that, but I don't want to be too spoilery.

But so, Abaddon's Gate. The title, like its predecessors, is all kinds of highbrow, here referring to a place of ultimate destruction and dread which the protomolecule that wrecked everything in the first two novels has created outside the orbit of Uranus and which the puny humans have taken to calling The Ring. It's enormous, it's mysterious, humanity's first contact with it ends spectacularly badly, and it appears to have reanimated a beloved* character from Leviathan Wakes in order to reach out to a slightly less beloved* but still conventionally animate star of both Leviathan and Caliban's War and issue via him a warning: All these worlds are yours except Europa Leave the Ring alone and don't piss it off.

But of course, nobody's interested in this message or its import, and for plot reasons, all our characters old and new wind up heading out to poke at the Ring and I'm bored just typing this much synopsis. But then A THING HAPPENS, and the giant thought experiment in what happens to bodies when various high-powered forces interact with them way the hell out beyond Uranus and the next couple of hundred pages are gruesome and sad (because there are, again, some wonderful characters thrown into this mess; Naomi and Amos and Alex [and yeah, yeah, Holden] from the first novel and new favorites Anna [a Methodist minister who's part of a religious expedition to explore the Meaning of the Ring] and Bull [second in command of the Outer Planets Alliance's jerry-rigged and recommissioned giant mother of a spaceship, Behemoth, which was originally built to be a generation ship to take a colony of Mormons to settle another solar system before being repurposed into a military, well, behemoth]) and tense as everybody struggles to deal with the aftermath of the THING THAT HAPPENED and the things that are probably inevitably going to happen now (the stakes wind up being no less than the survival of the entire Solar System and all of humanity with it) unless the ragtag fleet of affected people can somehow pull together, stop fighting, and do what they're supposed to do according to what Holden kind of thinks is what the reanimated Miller was kind of trying to tell him...?

Which, of course, is not easy, because the survivors of the THING THAT HAPPENED are about equally divided (apparently) between heroes and assholes, and the assholes have a whole other wrong plan for how to deal with the Ring and are willing to kill to implement it, which means lots and lots of zero gravity combat in the confines of the Behemoth. Which means that when the TV show gets to this bit, it might well wind up being a whole season's worth of Bottle Episode (OR will manage to compress all of this text into just a couple of Bottle Episodes) but hey, the special effects guys will really get to go to town making all these floating globules of blood and tissue rotating and coming together to form little planets of gore and whatnot in addition to all of the impressive zero gee effects they've already hit us with, so you know, I'm down.

I say that again, I'm down. Because so far this is looking like I didn't like the book, but I actually did. Especially I admire Abaddon's Gate from a technical standpoint: the thought experiment is brilliant, brilliantly presented, and brilliantly evocative of all of the challenges that await us in space even if there aren't ancient and powerful and inimical civilizations waiting to turn us into goo. Space, as we're reminded every time one of our sad little efforts to lift a cargo out of our gravity well goes wrong, is hard. It's gonna get harder. It might still prove impossible. But I choose to believe it is possible and that someday we'll prove it. And so books like this one are super important and exciting even as they're also gross and depressing.

I'm especially down to explore this with these characters; I love the truly diverse range of people that populate this literary universe. Not just racially, not just gravitationally, but also representative of a broad range of callings. How many sci-fi franchises give a significant role to a preacher out in the black? This one and Firefly (sort of; Book could have stood a lot more screen time and we just have to take it on faith [hee] that he was going to get it later on) and... uh...? And Anna doesn't play her role by dropping her bible and picking up a gun; from start to finish, she is what she is, she works how she works, and it winds up mattering quite a lot that she's out there at the Ring. I really, really dig that, just as last novel I dug the two-woman punch of Bobbie and Chrisjen. Hooray for fantastic characters!

But man, I was glad to finish this one so I could move on to other things. So many other things, you guys. Like, I probably have to start all over again on the Doctor Who novel I was reading when I also picked up this book. And stuff.

Speaking of which, there's a second episode of Thrawn and On and On for your listening pleasure. Make with the clicky and explore the Star Wars Explengendary Universe with us!

*These are, of course, in my humble opinion, your mileage may vary, blah blah blah. I loved Miller and I tolerate Holden because he has cool friends.

James S.A. Corey's CALIBAN'S WAR

The first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes was a Belter punk detective story in space opera clothing, and entertaining as hell, entertaining enough for me to set aside the books I was intending to read next and plunge right into the sequel. So what's the sequel, Caliban's War?

Man, the sequel is pretty much a horror novel with a sprinkling of military fiction in space opera clothing, innit? In fact, on reflection, it reminded me more than a bit of two favorites: the earlier Alien films, and Paul Elard Cooley's horror/petroleum punk The Black novels and, of course, Scott Sigler's Infected series. In fact, imagine a possibly omnipotent, physics-defying combination of those three menaces and set it in a human-settled solar system and you've pretty much got the protomolecule that is the main background threat of the Expanse series thus far.

So while I enjoyed meeting up with (almost) all of the characters I'd come to enjoy in the last novel, and my introduction to three new ones, it was really the horror/suspense elements of the plot, and the characters' (largely post-traumatic) reactions to them, that really kept me advancing the pages of Caliban's War. Especially the reactions. This book so successfully evoked the PTSD experience (at least as experienced by Your Humble Blogger) that it actually gave me quite a bit of trouble mid-novel. I won't say I had a full-blown attack, but I was pretty much a mess for the middle third of the story. Part of me is very upset about this, because triggering someone's PTSD is not at all nice, but the rest of me admires the effectiveness this had in absolutely freaking riveting me to what I was reading.**

But so, your mileage may vary there. A lot of people have whined that this book isn't as good as its predecessor (and they're not totally wrong in that lots of it does rehash/recycle elements from LW, right down to the Find the Missing Girl plot), but I don't see it. I was able to put the first one down, sometimes for days. This one, this one I barely slept.

But I wasn't just scared, reading CW. I also just enjoyed. I really dig all the characters from the first novel that carried over into this one (though I sure do miss [REDACTED]), and the new ones introduced here are just as great.*** Everybody gets a very satisfying character arc (well, except maybe Naomi, who has diminished into a stock girlfriend character who only occasionally gets to do something kind of important behind the scenes with her magical technological skills. Fix that, Coreys!) and their adventures with the Caliban-esque**** (in that they are supernaturally powerful beings imperfectly subjected to human will, only to of course throw off their chains and raise hell) protomolecular monsters are amazing, of course.

There was something else, though, that really fascinated me in CW, and that's the depiction of how Ganymede functions, and how it falls apart. Here the two-headed Corey monster really went to town, fully and convincingly realizing a complete world, a total artificial ecosystem on which not only its immediate inhabitants depend but on which most of the Outer Planets and the Belt do, too, and then tearing it all down in excruciating detail. It's kind of like watching a giant domino display of doom going down. Yes, I realize I'm probably a big ol' jerk for enjoying this aspect as much as I did. But I'm sure I'm not alone.

Now excuse me. I have to start on the next one. Because of [REDACTED] showing up at the end and not being [REDACTED] but instead [REDACTED]. Dude!

*Which, Bob help me, I always want to type -- and say -- as Leviathan's Wake. I'm sure there's something Freudian there but I don't care. It's just something that simultaneously amuses and annoys me.

**Much as in a full-blown event, I knew perfectly well that nothing was actually happening at the time and I was perfectly safe in my comfortable home and so was everybody else I care about, but knowing intellectually that nothing is wrong is not enough to stop me feeling it in my gut and shaking and crying, or to let me tear myself away from the horror show in my head. Because who wants to stop and do EMDR while reading a freaking sci-fi novel?

***Though man, the TV show sure did improve on Avasarala (even as the TV writers had to create her story out of whole cloth for the show, because she's not in the parts of the books that the first TV season covered). Not just because Shohreh Aghdashloo is fantastic and lends the character considerable gravitas and grace, but because she had to do something to get her point across besides swearing. I have no particular problem with cursing usually, but book-Avasarala relies entirely too much on the harmless-looking little old lady shocking everybody with F-bombs to get her point across. Jeebus!

****Read your damned Shakespeare.

James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN WAKES

So, a lot of people who are talking about these books and the rather good television adaptation they've recently spawned* seem to be very interested in having the argument over whether Leviathan's Wake and its sequels count as Space Opera or not. And maybe I should wait until I've read further into the series before I form my opinion, but I have an early contender for an answer to the question, and that is: it's not. Because it's its own thing, and the two-headed monster that writes as James S.A. Corey already done named it: it's Belter Punk.

At least this first book is. There are hints throughout, of course, that the series as a whole is going to have that galactic sweep and scale and sense of awe and alienness that people go to Space Opera for, but this book right here, this is Belter Punk, which within the text of the novel refers to a genre of (presumably) grungy and loud and unlovely but passionate music favored by residents of the asteroid belt/minor planets out between Mars and Jupiter, where they live inside hollowed-out rocks and aren't quite self-contained but sure do try but meanwhile they're still dependent on Earth and Mars and various shipping vessels to make sure they don't run out of air or water. It's an unglamorous life out there in the Sol system, and the people who have adapted to it have gotten a tad strange, and not just because a general lack or low level of gravity have made them tall and skinny and big-headed and knobby-jointed and a tad resentful.

But so it's mostly Belters we're dealing with, here at the beginning of the Expanse series, chiefly in the persons of James Miller and Naomi Nagata, he a terse, embittered gumshoe straight out of a Dashiell Hammet, she a tech wiz who starts out her novel-life serving on the crew of a space-freighter hauling water to Ceres, the minor planet in/on which Miller has spent his whole life...

But there are planetary types, too, out there among them, including Earther Jim Holden, the Executive Officer of the freighter on which Naomi serves, who grew up in some kind of official polyamorous group marriage in Montana and was supposed to take over/save the family's ranch there someday but instead headed for outer space; Amos Burton, also an Earther, and a smarter and more useful (and even more quotable) version of Jayne Cobb if ever there was one, who serves as a mechanic on the freighter; Alex Kamal, he of East Indian descent and Texas accent that mark him out as a guy who grew up on Mars and quite the pilot; and Fred Johnson, he of the colorful military past who is now the somewhat shady "unofficial prime minister" of the Outer Planets Alliance.**

It's a not-too-surprising combination of noir detective plot (enacted by Miller) and a mystery/assassination/perils of Pauline plot (enacted by the freighter crew) that bring them all into each other's orbits, as both investigations eventually lead the parties to the same place, where they make a creepy and potentially system-shattering discovery involving the secret origins of one of Saturn's moons and a nasty "protomolecule" that is a sort of weaponized version of the noocytes of Blood Music (Greg Bear) fame.

There are lots of space battles and starship chases and space station explosions and squicky evil to enjoy as the plot tosses the characters around, making this a fun as well as a politically interesting read, but what really sold me on it was the character of Miller, the washed-up detective who is tossed a case that's pretty much meant to be unsolvable but decides to give it his all anyway, with melancholy as well as explosive results. He's in every way a literary cliche that should make one yawn, but his background as a guy born and raised in space gives him just enough freshness to make all that old, sad stuff feel new again. And I'm not just talking about the fungal whiskey he drinks (though maybe more than a bit is due to what watchers of the TV series have waggishly dubbed the "Space Fedora of Justice" even though it is very clearly named several times in the text as a porkpie and not a fedora, but anyway). His story is absorbing enough on its own, but when it becomes entertwined with those of the freighter crew members, it all gets wonderfully complex, until there is a moment when the essential natures of Miller and Holden so perfectly clash and transform each other, and with that the plot, and I just sort of sat there stunned for a while and had to stop reading and unpack more boxes (I recently moved to a new house).

I have no idea if the other four books in the series so far are going to hold my attention as well as this one did because of [REDACTED], but the way my Own Dear Personal Mother is tearing through them (she's already on the fifth novel and sort of tapping her foot at me, but hey, she still hasn't read any of the Song of Ice and Fire yet, just seen the TV show, so, you know, that.) I'd say it's an even money bet at what's left of the casino on Eros that they will. I've already started on Caliban's War...

*And yes, once again, the TV people caught me flat-footed. I've had this series on my to-read radar for years now, but kept getting distracted by shinies, and now they've gone and made the first half-or-so of this novel and chunks of later ones into a whole season of high-quality TV! It's The Last Kingdom all over again. D'oh!

**One of several factions rubbing up against each other and not-quite-fighting over resources in this human-settled Solar System, with Earth and Mars the inner planet superpowers, the Belt a somewhat chaotic mess of colonial outposts and outright corporate properties, and the at-times seemingly terroristic Outer Planets Alliance, aka OPA serving as a catch-all for further flung outposts' interests and meddling a good bit in the affairs of the Belt, too. Which is to say that if you don't like a lot of political plottery in your sci-fi, these books might not turn out to be your favorites, but I'd still give them a try for the reasons I've outlined above.

Paul Elard Cooley's THE BLACK: A DEEP SEA THRILLER

I like to see an author stretch himself, and stretching is what Paul Elard Cooley* is doing with his latest novel, his deep sea thriller The Black. On the surface an ocean-borne monster tale that has been described as Peter Benchley meets H.P. Lovecraft, The Black has more going on than just watching well-constructed characters getting et by a monster.

For starters, The Black has rather a unique setting -- a deep sea petroleum exploration platform, where roughnecks spend months at a time working hard and getting smelly, far from their families or anything like civilization. This particular platform is a locus of unusual excitement even before the horror elements set in: it's potentially on top of an oil find so big that it might allow the U.S. to tell the Middle East to pound sand.

Enter a crew of specialists, experts in fields like robotics and petroleum geology and ways to use the former to improve our understanding of the latter. They fit in poorly on the rig (even the ones who are not -- gasp -- women), and the tension between them and the roughnecks gives the novel a greater depth and substance than people usually go looking for in monster stories. Some readers have apparently complained of this a bit, but I find it only makes me care about the characters all the more when the excrement hits the air conditioning, as it does.

Oh, it does.

Cooley has also gone to the extraordinary trouble of creating a wholly new monster. I joked on twitter early on that oh, no, the robots were about to shave Cthulhu, but I was dead wrong. As it were. Actually, I'm still trying to sort out what matter of entity is disturbed to the characters' peril. It's not just big and black and aquatic; its biology is utterly alien (especially if I'm correctly understanding that what is causing most of the trouble in the exciting second half of the novel is pretty much just the entity's blood? lymph? anyway, some kind of body fluid), as is its level of sentience. And, spoiler alert, the mystery is maintained to the very end, but not without satisfying the reader's need for, you know, an ending.

I look forward most eagerly to its sequel, which promises to broaden the greater story's scope and threat, just as Cooley's pal (and mine) Scott Sigler's Infected trilogy did. Yowza. I just can't wait to find out what the Snape this entity/creature/thing IS!!!

*Reviewer's note: Cooley is a personal friend, so, you know, bias alert. But if I don't like a friend's books, I don't write about them. And if you haven't noticed by now, I'm a pretty demanding reader so, you know, don't let the bias alert scare you off, mmmkay?

Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN

You can keep your Heathcliffes, your Darcys, your Rochesters ; my literary boyfriend on whom I call dibs for all time is Mark Watney, almost-omnicompetent botanist, engineer, Martian.

Andy Weir's The Martian feels like it has a very familiar premise -- Robinson Crusoe on Mars anyone? -- but Weir's hero makes it a unique story all its own. Stranded on a newly-established Mars base after a sandstorm forces the rest of his crew to abort their years-long mission (an accident during the evacuation leads everyone to believe Mark has perished), he has to choose whether to give up and die and spare himself a slow suffering death from starvation after his NASA rations run out, or to outthink his situation and live. He chooses, of course, the latter, even though he is pretty sure no one is ever going to come to his rescue. And there is much rejoicing.

His story is told via his logs, in which he details his thought processes and his progress toward survival (making water, making [via a combination of Martian dirt and his own poop] garden soil, growing potatoes, hacking the expedition's exploration and sampling equipment to turn it all into a survival machine) as well as his occasional exasperation at his erstwhile crewmates' taste in culture; the mission commander had a serious Seventies problem, and her choices completely govern how Mark winds up spending his leisure hours while, e.g., waiting for batteries to recharge, for potato seedlings to grow, for hydrolysis to happen.

Intercut with Mark's journal entries are conventional third-person narratives detailing how NASA discovers he is still alive and the extraordinary efforts to which they -- and the rest of the planet, really -- go to get him home again. These characters are as vividly realized as Mark is, and almost as enjoyable to watch in action. Almost.

All this is very exciting and enjoyable, but really, for me it's the competence porn that makes this book the delight that it is. Mark is not truly omnicompetent -- he has some scary near misses and makes some nearly-deadly mistakes -- but he's close enough. Give me a man who can make his own soil, hack a Mars rover and maintain his sanity on a cultural diet of nothing but Three's Company reruns and I'll... no, just give me that man, all right?

And yes, I still want to go to Mars. Maybe my cadaver can go someday at least (which, see next review)...

T.J. Bass' THE GODWHALE

An absolute kitchen-sink classic* of more-or-less-mid-century science fiction, T.J. Bass' The Godwhale is one of the most enjoyable reads I've had this year, even while it was also, broadly, pretty bleak.

The story starts firmly in  overpopulated, dystopian Stand on Zanzibar territory, with our sort-of-protagonist, Larry Dever, quickly and stupidly maneuvering himself into becoming a medical time traveler by getting himself cut in half. The medical science of his near-future time still isn't up to making him whole again, or at least not whole enough to suit him, so he elects to go into suspended animation until it can, gambling on Progress to give him back his legs, internal organs, and fully functioning tallywhacker. As one does.

Oddly enough, his gamble pays off in a way -- he becomes the ancestor to pretty much everyone else that matters in the rest of the story. But only in a way.

Seemingly irrelevant at the time but, as it turns out, crucial to the novel's denouement, Larry is first revived by a world in which his many-times-great-grand-nieces and nephews are getting ready to "seed" other planets, sending out genetic arks into outer space, and while they still can't bring him back to cherry-poppin' full functionality, they can still make him a star-daddy, after a fashion -- he's got wonderfully "primitive" genes compared to what's around in his new time -- humanity is starting to degenerate as only people who can handle overcrowding are able to/allowed to breed, resulting in a loss of hybrid vigor and good old fashioned paleolithic-ish awesomeness of which our man Larry is a last surviving example, even though he's now just a "hemi-human." They'd love to graft him onto a clone-grown lower half and send him into the stars, but when he finds out just how they'd accomplish this, he elects to go back to sleep. They can use his clone-grown material as well as his own sweet self to seed the stars.

All of this is just prologue, though... and then he wakes up again, more or less by accident, into the world of The Hive, in which Bass' other novel Half-Past Human, is set (apparently The Godwhale is a sequel thereto. Oops). A world in which humanity now averages about four feet tall (if that) lives by the multi-billions in one giant, continent-spanning, computer-controlled underground city in unbearably close quarters, below vast Gardens of the kind only Monsanto could love (as in the food plants cannot pollinate themselves or in any way breed, and have to be synthesized from the amino acids up) that exist solely to provide calories for the teeming masses crammed in below, in which no animal life apart from the Hive's stunted little denizens exists, and in which the oceans are completely, lifelessly sterile.

Except for the titular Godwhale, a Harvester, a cybernetic whale remnant of some civilization that existed about halfway between Larry's first awakening and his second, in which giant artificially intelligent cyborgs gathered all the fish and plankton and sea greens and protein from the sea and existed to serve man. This one last cyborg, who lends the novel its title, seems from its having that honor like it's going to be more of a personality within said novel, but alas, the Rokal Maru serves more as a setting-cum-excuse than a partner in protagonism to Larry. I would have loved to have her as more of a character and less of a plot device. Alas. Anyway, she's spent hundreds of years beached on a reef somewhere until suddenly her little robot friend Trilobite discovers not only that there are still people on this here planet, but also maybe some other things are starting to show up, too. Almost as if a cache of biological samples somehow broke open or something. Hmm!

This all probably seems super spoilery, but really, I assure you, it isn't. This is all milieu I'm explaining here, a setting in which a complex and varied plot told in a series of vignettes over decades takes place and which I'm not going to divulge except to say that, well, yes, Larry's genes got around really good for a guy who didn't even have gonads by the end of the first chapter.

Author T.J. Bass, who sadly died in 2011, thus preventing me from fangirling him on social media because I'd not yet heard of him, was a medical doctor by profession, meaning there is enough hard sci-fi content here to satisfy the most grognard among us (provided he considers medicine and biology to be science-y enough), but it almost never overwhelms the story, or the action, of which there is plenty.

I've never so enjoyed being so disappointed in humanity, you guys. Ever.

*Seriously. From its titular cybernetic whale/ship to its medical time travel to its status as another finger-wagging parable to its post-apocalyptic (and post-post apocalyptic, and post-post-post apocalyptic)(remember, it's sort of a time travel tale, though all the travel is in one direction) settings to its The Man Who Folded Himself identity-collapsing (half the novel's characters are pretty much clones of its sort-of-point-of-view character) to its reverse Planet of the Apes ending, this novel is going to remind you of everything while still being its own unique thing. Quite a feat, that!

Ian Sales' ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF RAINS

Now that I know that alternate history Cold War Apollopunk is a thing, I want more of it. Much more. Good thing Ian Sales' Adrift on the Sea of Rains is but the first of a quartet of novellas, then!

As the story opens, a small band of astronauts manning a permanent American base on the Moon (established as part of a natural progression from the Apollo missions, in that time frame and with that technology) find themselves marooned there when the USA and the USSR decide to go ahead and fight out World War III and destroy the planet Earth, rendering its glorious blue-white marble a desolate grey rock to match its satellite. The astronauts have (nuclear!) power, and thus life support, for 20 years, but only have freeze-dried astronaut chow to last them about two! Oh noes!

Fortunately, one of their number is not really an astronaut but a mad scientist plucked from Nazi Germany and secretly put to work continuing his experiments travel between parallel universes. He's obnoxious as hell but he's their only hope once he's completed his masterpiece (which would only work in a vacuum, hence his presence on the Moon), allowing them to start jumping from universe to universe in search of one where nobody ever actually decided to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War.

And then the fun begins. Because our astronauts have to jury-rig and re-start all that wild old Apollo-era technology to try to get themselves to their new home!

The story of this mighty effort is intercut with the previous test piloting-and-espionage experiences of the Moon Base commander, Vance Peterson, in a series of cleverly arranged flashbacks that also tell the tale of how the disaster came to be. It's good storytelling, no doubt, but what makes this novella really stand out is its visceral conveyance of the experience of trusting the analogue tech of the late 1960s and early 1970s to keep people alive and hurl them across space. Famously, the Eagle that landed in Apollo 11 had less computing power in it than the smartphone in your pocket, but that's just the beginning. Paper-thin hulls. Huge banks of switches. Ring binders full of gnarly math and densely printed instructions. Slide rules and pencils. It's utterly, utterly glorious.

Scott Sigler's PANDEMIC

What if Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitors found us back when we lived on just the one planet, and instead of harnessing the destructive power of stellar physics to destroy us, were masters of biotechnology instead and just hijacked our own brains and bodies into doing it?

Such is the malevolent force Scott Sigler has created for his Infected series, my fondness for which I have covered elsewhere. The machines working to wreak apocalyptic havoc on humanity refer to them as The Creators, but we could really maybe call them Space Republicans, for their knee-jerk reaction to the idea that the universe might contain sentient life other than themselves is to seek to destroy that life utterly before it evolves to the point of developing space travel and the ability to destroy The Creators. See also Douglas Adams' Crikketers.

The result is a combination of first rate body horror and disaster porn, rather than space opera, but the comparison stands. As Reynolds draws on a prior career as a professional astronomer, Sigler draws on the expertise of his rabid fanbase (known as "Junkies" the ranks of whom include the likes of Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who gets a hilarious cameo-tweet mid-story) and his own formidable attention to scientific detail, again almost to a fault. Reynolds' books occasionally threaten to drift into becoming astronomy primers; this series of Sigler's has passages that might stand up in a college biology textbook -- but it's all the service of selling the story. And lots of people are buying, including your humble blogger.

Pandemic, the third and final volume in the series takes all of the bio-medical creepiness, apocalyptic threat and heroic angst of Infected and Contagious, turns the volume up to 11, and rips off the knob. With each novel, the Creators' semi-sentient minions have learned more about human biology on both the individual and the social levels and have exploited that knowledge to nearly destroy humanity, only to be barely thwarted by the combined efforts of a team of scientists, soldiers and politicians who contain the threats posed in the nick of time, and through the individual bravery of a few early victims like washed-up football hero Perry Dawson, patient zero in the first novel, who still looms larger than life after death in this third one.*

Dr. Margaret Montoya, the woman who failed to save Perry, but who saved a lot of other people at great cost, is more or less the hero of this one, or at least she's supposed to be, but once again, despite her scientific brilliance, her strength, her crippling guilt and her marital problems, she's the least interesting character in the book. But this isn't because she's a badly drawn or boring character; she's just got a lot of competition, not the least of which from the disease itself, whose "point of view" Sigler relates in several interludes of frightening plausibility and maximum grossness (seriously, trigger warning for you germophobes out there. If someone blowing his/her nose in your presence squicks you out, if you're one of those people whose hands are constantly drenched in hand sanitizer, this is maybe not the book for you). And the other characters, including Ancestor's Dr. Tim Feely, still yucking it up even as he fights to save the world again. And the plot. And the colossal world-wide scope of the problem she faces, a plot so apocalyptically epic that the most vivid and compelling character in the world would pretty much get lost in it.

The fact that she doesn't, nor do the new characters introduced in this novel, says everything about Sigler as a writer; he achieves a near-flawless balance between character moments, dire exposition and insane-to-the-point-of-thigh-slapping ACKSHUN. The result is a compelling and ickily plausible read even before the climactic hijinks.

I expected nothing less.

*As well he should. He and his chicken scissors are unforgettable.