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Justina Robson, Natural History: Humanity, altering itself biologically and mechanically, has colonized large chunks of the solar system, but the very changes necessary to do so have created political tensions between Earth and the colonies, unaltered humans and altered. A deep-space explorer, hurt and dying, comes across a mysterious technology that enables instantaneous interstellar travel (and does other things, too; they call it Stuff because it does whatever you want it to do) but also starts to change her. She wants to use it to move her biologically altered compatriots to their own system, away from the oppression of the unaltered, but she's induced to take an unaltered observer to that system first, to evaluate her claims. Meanwhile, Stuff is spreading to other people/ships, with disruptive effects. A complex setup, but one I was ultimately bored by, because the characters seemed like ideologies without flavor – perhaps this distance was an intended effect, since most of them were as different from me as a caterpillar is, but then I don't read books from a caterpillar POV either.
George R.R. Martin, Dying of the Light: My least favorite Martin so far, this short book involves a dying world in a far-future setting. A man arrives on the planet, which is hurrying towards eternal night, at the behest of Jenny, an ex-lover who'd abandoned him, to find her married into an extremely rigid patriarchal culture. She hates the culture but may love her husband or may want to be rescued from him; she doesn't necessarily know. Members of the culture tend to think of outsiders as subhuman, and even to hunt them, though Jenny's husband is very progressive and tries to protect the protagonist and the other outsiders on the world. As the book goes on, loyalties get more complicated and tangled (I didn't even mention the guy who's essentially a co-husband). Martin's strength is, as usual, in complex characterization: even hateful characters have recognizable humanity; even weak characters have morals and understandable reasons. My problem was that the patriarchal culture was too far removed from ours to make sense to me in the short time allowed by this novel, while the protagonist seemed oddly cultureless by default; that is, he sort of believed what an early twenty-first-century American person like myself would believe, though he didn't much get into the question of moral relativism, which would seem to be important under the circumstances. I wanted an explanation of how this guy's culture managed to be transparent while other parts of humanity had changed so much. And the protagonist wasn't very likeable, which has not been a hindrance to my enjoyment of other Martin characters, but was here, when I didn't have a sense of the background that had made him who he was.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Effendi: This is the second book in the Arabesk series; I missed the first one, but will probably track it down on the basis of this still-enjoyable volume. It's set in an alternate history in which the Ottoman Empire still exists in the late twenty-first century. Ashraf Bey, the new chief of detectives in a major city-state with nominal allegieance to the Empire, has a lot of problems, not least of which is that representatives from France, Germany and America want to try one of his leading citizens for some gruesome murders. That citizen happens to be a major gangster, and also the father of the woman with whom Ashraf is in love, though he recently refused to marry her. I missed some important things starting with the second book, but the brisk noirish tone (Ashraf has a complex and dark past, and kills and hurts people with angst but abandon) carried me along, and I'd like to know more about Ashraf and his genius little sister.
Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies: This is the third Takeshi Kovacs novel, and it finds Takeshi back on his homeworld, hunted by an illegal clone of himself – the ruling powers don't take too kindly to having two of the same person running around at once, and they might not be too careful about which one has to go. And he's finally confronting his complicated relationship to Quellism, the political philosophy responsible for a civil war not too long ago, as he deals with a person who may have Quellcrist Falconer's personality downloaded into her, or may just have a very smart virus. I felt this was Morgan's saggiest outing to date, though the political anti-theory (anarchism for the depressed, sort of) integrated well into the narrative. I wanted more time with the clone than we got, and Takeshi bounced uneasily between angst over his body count and unconcern.
George R.R. Martin, Dying of the Light: My least favorite Martin so far, this short book involves a dying world in a far-future setting. A man arrives on the planet, which is hurrying towards eternal night, at the behest of Jenny, an ex-lover who'd abandoned him, to find her married into an extremely rigid patriarchal culture. She hates the culture but may love her husband or may want to be rescued from him; she doesn't necessarily know. Members of the culture tend to think of outsiders as subhuman, and even to hunt them, though Jenny's husband is very progressive and tries to protect the protagonist and the other outsiders on the world. As the book goes on, loyalties get more complicated and tangled (I didn't even mention the guy who's essentially a co-husband). Martin's strength is, as usual, in complex characterization: even hateful characters have recognizable humanity; even weak characters have morals and understandable reasons. My problem was that the patriarchal culture was too far removed from ours to make sense to me in the short time allowed by this novel, while the protagonist seemed oddly cultureless by default; that is, he sort of believed what an early twenty-first-century American person like myself would believe, though he didn't much get into the question of moral relativism, which would seem to be important under the circumstances. I wanted an explanation of how this guy's culture managed to be transparent while other parts of humanity had changed so much. And the protagonist wasn't very likeable, which has not been a hindrance to my enjoyment of other Martin characters, but was here, when I didn't have a sense of the background that had made him who he was.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Effendi: This is the second book in the Arabesk series; I missed the first one, but will probably track it down on the basis of this still-enjoyable volume. It's set in an alternate history in which the Ottoman Empire still exists in the late twenty-first century. Ashraf Bey, the new chief of detectives in a major city-state with nominal allegieance to the Empire, has a lot of problems, not least of which is that representatives from France, Germany and America want to try one of his leading citizens for some gruesome murders. That citizen happens to be a major gangster, and also the father of the woman with whom Ashraf is in love, though he recently refused to marry her. I missed some important things starting with the second book, but the brisk noirish tone (Ashraf has a complex and dark past, and kills and hurts people with angst but abandon) carried me along, and I'd like to know more about Ashraf and his genius little sister.
Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies: This is the third Takeshi Kovacs novel, and it finds Takeshi back on his homeworld, hunted by an illegal clone of himself – the ruling powers don't take too kindly to having two of the same person running around at once, and they might not be too careful about which one has to go. And he's finally confronting his complicated relationship to Quellism, the political philosophy responsible for a civil war not too long ago, as he deals with a person who may have Quellcrist Falconer's personality downloaded into her, or may just have a very smart virus. I felt this was Morgan's saggiest outing to date, though the political anti-theory (anarchism for the depressed, sort of) integrated well into the narrative. I wanted more time with the clone than we got, and Takeshi bounced uneasily between angst over his body count and unconcern.
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