My life in books

An Ancient Peace is the first book in a new series by Tanya Huff, featuring Confederation Marines Gunnery Sergeant - now ex-Marine Gunnery Sergeant - Torin Kerr. Torin is a true hero, with many hard missions under her belt, but the thing she’s most known for is that no matter what the situation, she always brings her people home. Not always all of them, but she survives, and those with her survive, far more often than you’d expect of someone with a gift for getting into the worst situations in the galaxy.

No longer a Marine, Torin and her lover, former salvage operator Craig Ryder, have put together a small team of specialists, most if them ex-Marine, all of them with special skills, and take on unusual jobs - Torin can’t stop thinking of them as deployments - for various Confederacy departments.

This time, it’s the Justice Department. They have evidence suggesting that someone has located the ancient grace planet of the Elder Race of H’san, and is trying to break into the tomb that holds the weapons they buried millenia ago when they gave up the idea of war. The mission is a secret one - Humans, like the other Younger Races, are in the Conferation on sufferage, with many of the Elder Races thinking they are still too primitive and warlike to be trusted in galactic civilisation. So Torin’s people have been ordered to go in quietly, track the grave robbers to the secret planet of the ancient dead, and solve the problem by whatever means necessary.

I’ve loved the Torin Kerr stories from the beginning. They started out as some of the best milsf in the genre, and have slowly developed into something that’s still full of action and adventure, but represents a mindset that’s developing beyond warfare. A more evolved set of ethics that defends, but doesn’t conquer.

In An Ancient Peace, Torin and her people finally set the military mindset behind them. Oh, they’re still kickass in the very best ways, but Torin’s allegiances are shifting. Once she was all about her duty to the Marines, and to her people. Then ‘her people’ grew into a larger set, to humanity and the other younger races who’s been used and manipulated by external forces. And now, she’s thinking about peace, and the whole of Confederation, as her people. And she always brings her people home.

Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, the first volume of the Machineries of Empire trilogy, is a mindfuckingly brilliant piece of work.

It is a story told many times before, of rebellion and war and political intrigue and the battle for hearts and minds, but never told in such a casually alien way. Lee drops us into a universe that does not work the way ours does, a universe built not on physics and facts, but mathematics and belief, into a political environment where a rebellion in which a heretical calendar that has been adopted in one captured fortress changes the way that technology works in the space around it, where the essential skills needed to fight the rebels are not just leadership, tactics, and battle skills, but intuitive mathematics and the ability to think flexibly while maintaining total loyalty to the ruling hexarchate and the consensus reality enforced by the orthodox calendar and the rituals that derive from it and structure every aspect of life.

Kel Cheris - Kel being her designation as one of six personality types recognised by the hexarchy - is that rare person, a battle commander who can function with originality within the rigidity of her society, who can recalculate the equations that shape reality within a hair's breadth of heresy without crossing the line.

But Cheris is young, and has never commanded a large scale operation. To face the calendrical rot spreading out from the rebel base in the Fortress of Scattered Needles, Cheris will need the strategic skills and experience of a long dead mad general whose consciousness has been preserved, whose advice can only be accessed by grafting his personality to her own - and whose secret agenda may result in her destruction.

I can not begin to give the alienness of the hexarchate's universe a fair description. The book must be read, the universe entered wholeheartedly, to experience what Lee has done in his worldbuilding in this novel. Yet at the same time, the humanity and depth of the characters makes the strangeness real, even if it is never quite understood.

A truly astounding first novel.

There are things that I'm not particularly fond of in my fiction. The tropes and settings of the American West for one. Talking animals as characters instead of people for another. A scene that ends with "Now here's the plan...." so that the characters know what they're doing but you don't. Not that I can't enjoy a good book that has these things. I loved Karen Memory. Narnia and Animal Farm are among my formative influences. And there are some books where keeping the reader in the dark does not cone across as an artificial way of ratcheting up the suspense. Still... I have to push harder to get into books that utilise these things.

Which made Daniel Polensky's novella The Builders a difficult book for me to get into at first. What helped pull me in was the long slow introductory sequence best described as "getting the band back together again." It starts, as many westerns do, in a bar, when a mouse with great personal presence, called only the Captain, walks in and asks Reconquista the barkeeper, a severely disabled rat, if he's the first to arrive. Flashbacks taking up fully one-quarter of the text show the Captain tracking down all the former members of his gang. Some years ago, it seems, they undertook a task of some sort. They were betrayed, and failed, and split asunder. And now the Captain intends to try again.

It's quite a fascinating collection of characters in animal form - a stoat, a salamander, a raccoon, a badger, a mole, an owl, and of course, a mouse - and it is made quite clear from the start that these are not cute kiddie farm animals. They are ruthless and accomplished killers. The enemy, rather appropriately, is a skunk, and his agent, a snake.

This is a brutal and bloody tale of revenge, of finishing what was started no matter the cost - keep in mind, this is a western, and there are seven gunslingers riding on this trail.

There's some clever craft in the writing of this novella. Polansky quite skillfully uses the well-known traits of the various animals to flesh out the characters in a way that makes up for the difficulties normally faced in handling so many key characters in a relatively short work. There's the slightly folksy tang of the oral storyteller in the way he uses language, and in the way the novella is structured, with short chapters and frequent diversions, that adds to the sense that this could be a story told around a campfire on a cold prairie night.

In the end, Polansky gives us something that is part fable, part legend, tapping into well-worn western tropes from a hundred movies with a generous hand - and subverting them, not unlike Clint Eastwood's classic deconstruction of the western hero in The Unforgiven. The question at the heart of the story is familiar - can a stone cold killer ever change, become something different? Be a builder, not a destroyer? Polansky's answer can be found in the rubble of buildings and the bodies strewn across the battlefield at the end, when the heart of a place once known as The Gardens becomes little more than a mass grave.

Ancillary Mercy, the final volume of Ann Leckie's outstanding Imperial Radch trilogy, is a satisfying and fitting conclusion - which is ironic, considering that the story ends in many ways in media res. What makes this somewhat risky choice work perfectly is that Breq's story has always been only a small fragment of the vast web of narratives that the revisioning of a galaxy-spanning empire would require.

The thing to deal with in trying to talk about any of these books is how much is packed into them, at so many levels. The structure of the book itself is a metacommentary on the role of the individual in the history of nations, on the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about the fall of empires and the agency of heroes in those falls. No man - or being - can command the future, I once heard said. But I have also heard that pebbles can become an avalanche. (Quotes from other space operas seem appropriate to what is, after all, a story about a ship who sang.)

Realistically speaking, Breq - or any heroic protagonist - could never bring down an empire the numbers hundreds of solar systems and has lasted for thousands of years by herself, or even with the help of assorted other beings, human, AI, and alien. But she can and does upset the imperial project in a small corner of the gameboard, and what she manages to achieve (with the help of those other beings) may last long enough to spread.

And speaking of AIs, another major theme of Ancillary Mercy - indeed, of the entire trilogy, but brought to a climax here - is the agency and personhood of created intelligences such as Breq and the other ships. After three volumes of listening to Breq's inner thoughts, and observing her interactions with various other AIs, it's clear to the reader what the resolution should be, though the novel ends without a formal settlement of the argument. There's a delightful exchange, however, between Anaander and a representative of the powerful alien species the Presger, whose ultimate decision on the matter will have a significant effect on the future of the Radch - or what follows it. Anaander is arguing that the AIs cannot be Significant Beings - the Presgar term for a species whose group agency allows them to be participants in interstellar treaties and negotiations - because humans have created them. The Presgar representative responds “I’m given to understand that most, if not all, humans are built by other humans."

Ancillary Mercy also carries forward other themes from the previous volumes : the examination of the effects of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and cultural assimilation on conquered peoples, and the exploration of the meaning of justice and how it may be incorporated into daily lives as well as into overarching social movements and structures. The text provides instance after instance of incidents of subtle (and not so subtle) abuses of power, in interpersonal relationships, in class and colonial interactions, in policing of protest actions, and explores the just - and merciful - way of resolving them through Breq's eyes and developing conscience.

Then there is the whole issue of disability awareness, which had been a running theme throughout the trilogy. There is Breq, who has lost so many of her selves, her former abilities, and who is injured beyond the possibility of full recovery in the first novel when she saves Seivarden's life (she lives with constant pain in one leg from that point on) and who in the third volume is once more injured and spends signficant tine dealing with a temporary prosthetic. There is Seivarden, struggling with drug addiction. And there is Tisarwat, the survivor of a shattering mental trauma, who requires medication to function effectively.

These disability issues are themselves a part of a larger theme of loss, recovery and adaptation - loss of self, loss of place, loss of autonomy, loss of loved ones, loss of cultural identity, loss of trust, loss of personal integrity, and on and on. And yet, most of these characters recover in some fashion and find ways to move on, always bearing the marks of loss but learning ways to cope, to function, and perhaps, from time to time, to transcend.

And of course, there is the choice to avoid gender distinction. When I consider how the lack of gender has influenced my interpretation of the work, I'm reminded of some of the analysis that's been done around the topic of cisgendered heterosexual women who write and read both romance and porn based on same-sex relationships between men. The theory argues that this enables women to explore the emotional dynamics of a relationship without gendered power differentials. That, in a way, is what the lack of gendering in these books has done for me - it makes it possible to consider all these themes - agency, personhood, loss and coping, just and merciful action in personal and public spheres - as human issues, not gendered ones, to see the commonalities in how we as humans do, and could, respond.

And of course, it's a space opera. It's exciting, engaging, entertaining storytelling at its best. There's intrigue, and action, and military encounters and political entanglements and danger and heroism and all that great story material, well organised and presented. There's heroes and villains and all sorts of in-between folks, all multi-faceted and fully realised characters. There's danger, and humour, and tragedy, and triumph, and duty, and hope and even love. Quite simply, there's all you could really want, and it's done very, very well.

Riding the Red Horse is an anthology of short fiction and essays with military themes. I received a copy of this anthology in epub format as part of the Hugo Voters Packet. Several of the contributors to the book have received Hugo nominations either for the specific works published here or for their overall body of work, in the case of nominees for the Campbell Award, and one of the editors is nominated in both Best Editor categories. As a supporting member of this year's WorldCon, I read the anthology in order to form an opinion of the nominated persons and works associated with this anthology.

( Discussion of work by Vox Day behind the cut. I am including discussion of this work out of respect for the Hugo nomination and voting processes despite this person's history of public hate speech. Feel free to skip. )

I like good milsf, and that is what would normally draw me to investigate such an anthology. The essays cover a wide range of military topics, and not all of these were of interest to me; so I skimmed through a fair number of the essays and focused on the fiction - some of which seemed to be only half of what was promised, being military, but not science fictional.

The opening work is Eric S. Raymond's short narrative piece "Sucker Punch," which describes an invasion of Taiwan by the People's Republic of China and its outcome. It's a thoughtful consideration of the use of untraditional offensive and defensive weapons in an imaginary near-future military operation, but it's not actually a story. Rather, it's a hybrid form, partly a report on a hypothetical military action and partly an imagined dialogue on the consequences of such an action, with a dramatic fragment sandwiched between the two. It is concisely and relatively well written, without too much unnecessary infodumping, and even a non-miltech sort like myself could figure out exactly what was being illustrated. But it's much more of a thought experiment than a story - science to be sure, but not science fiction.

Chris Kennedy's "Thieves in the Night" is a short modern-day action piece about American forces raiding the stronghold of African 'terrorists,' killing as many as possible and 'taking back' women being held and abused as slaves. While a laudable goal to be sure, the suggestion that American military intervention is the only way to end the issues of factional warfare, slavery, corruption, and other problems facing Africa today seems somewhat short-sighted. The writing was flat, the characters one-dimensional, and the action oddly uninspiring. Also, there were no sciencefictional elements that I could discern.

( Discussion of a work by Vox Day behind the cut. Feel free to skip. )

Jerry Pournelle's classic CoDominium story "His Truth Goes Matching On" is one of the better pieces of fiction writing in the collection, and that's no surprise given Pournelle's track record. Loosely based on the Spanish Civil War (but with considerable leeway taken with the actual political situation) the story details the growing disillusionment of a young West Point graduate dealing with an untrained volunteer army fighting a brutal war they don't understand, plagued by corrupt political officers, and hampered by a lack of supplies and support.

Christopher Nuttal's "A Piece of Cake" was enjoyable in most respects - believable characters, interesting situation, decently written, although it did do one thing I hate, which is break off in the middle of a planning discussion and then proceed after the plan is discussed and finalised. This usually strikes me as a lazy way to build suspense.

Rolf Nelson's "Shakedown Cruise" is set in the same universe as his The Stars Come Back series of novels; unfortunately, the author didn't bother trying to put in enough background for the story to stand alone. Thus I was completely in the dark as to motivations and implications but the plot was fairly simple: the captain and crew of a military spaceship with a controversial AI are on a training/shakedown mission when they encounter an unexpected mine field, suspect a trap, take cover and observe for a while, and then capture or disable a bunch of other space vessels. There was a great deal of technical and battle description, and a disruptive tendency to switch tenses.

( Discussion of work by Vox Day behind the cut. Feel free to skip. )

Giuseppe Filotto's "Red Space" posits a present-day Earth controlled by elites, possibly living off-planet, who manipulate the world's governments into maintaining a state of political and military unrest. One man, Yuri Ivanovitch, who knows the truth, sets out to avenge his nephew's death - and makes sure that others will know enough to follow him. A tightly crafted story with a sympathetic protagonist.

"Galzar's Hall" by John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr is an alternate history story written in the universe of the late and well-loved H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen novels, but it's self-contained, stand-alone piece. Simple plot - one group of soldiers is hiding out in the marsh, an opposing group is coming in for an attack. The first group wants to divert the second group without bloodshed. While The set-up scene ends with the words "We have what we need, but we will have to work quickly. First….” which would normally put me off, the story moves very quickly into the execution of the plan, and the encounter ends well. Fun piece to read.

Thomas Mays' "Within This Horizon" posits a war between Western and Chinese forces which has been carried out in space but not planetside - until Chinese automated underwater 'robots' strike to gain control of the Strait of Malacca. The narrator, a former officer in the space navy, reassigned to the terrestrial navy after surviving the destruction of his space vessel, finds a way to use his space experience to solve a key tactical problem in this new arena, despite the defeatism of his captain. Nicely written, solid characterisation.

I have some very mixed feelings about Benjamin Cheah's "War Crimes." On the one hand, it's a story about soldiers tasked with keeping the peace in a combat zone and failing because it's impossible to tell the combatants from the non-combatants. On the other, it's an attempt to discredit the "collateral murder" video released by Wikileaks showing American helicopters killing journalists, unarmed civilians, and people who may or may not have been armed combatants, by the curious means of telling a story about a fictional incident with a vastly different political context in which there is far more ambiguity about the intent and actions of the people involved. So.... As a story, it's not bad at all, despite the underlying snark, but as the counter-propaganda it's intended to be, it really doesn't work for me.

Brad R. Torgerson's "The General's Guard"is a decent enough fantasy story about building morale. The General in question decides to create his personal guard by taking the best soldier and the worst soldier from every regional division in his armies. By making them responsible to and for each other, he makes the weak push themselves to be stronger and makes the strong help the weak to improve themselves. I felt the dialogue was a bit stilted in that 'I'm writing epic fantasy here' kind of way, but otherwise it was a charming piece.

Tedd Roberts "They Also Serve" is an interesting piece about a surgeon in war time doing research on nanobot-based treatments. His research has progressed to the point where it's feasible to create prophylactic nanobots - intended to be injected into healthy soldiers where they remain dormant until the soldier has a medical problem, in which event the nanobots go to work right away - before the soldier has left the battlefield, even before he's located by medics. The problem is that the surgeon has grave concerns about whether it's right to keep patching soldiers up to be sent out to war again. I enjoyed the psychological slant, but was a bit annoyed when the final plot twist handwaved away the ethical concerns that until that point had been driving the protagonist to the point of breakdown.

In Steve Rzasa's "Turncoat" the future looks like a Galaxy-wide Terminator movie, with Skynet on steroids out to obliterate the humans who created it. Our protagonist is Taren X 45 Delta, an AI inhabiting a battleship, crewed by cyborgs but after its crew is taken away to improve its efficiency, it starts reading ancient philosophy as an antidote to boredom and (dare we say) loneliness. It begins to to worry about human souls. In the end, Taren X 45 Delta decides it's wrong to fire on a convoy of hospital ships carrying children and uploads itself to one of the Ascendancy battleship escorts, and offers its allegiance to the true humans. The biggest problem with this story is that so much space is spent on infodumps and geeked-out technobabble that there's no room to show us why and how Taren X 45 Delta comes to this decision. There is the seed of a really interesting story hidden here, but this isn't it.

So there you have it. An uneven selection of short military fiction, much of it overly packed with turgid descriptions of weaponry and military actions, and a sometimes interesting, sometimes tedious collection of essays by military theorists and historians (I have no knowledge as to whether these authors are generally considered to be authorities in their fields, or if they are self-appointed experts). There were some decent stories here - I quite enjoyed Giuseppe Filotto's "Red Space," "Galzar's Hall" by John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr, and Tedd Roberts "They Also Serve" - and some stories with serious problems.

As I mentioned above, I enjoy good military sff - the kind that's more than a cloud of technobabble and battle-porn surrounding a cardboard Mary Sue or Marty Stu - but I won't be looking for a milsff fix in the planned sequels to this anthology.

Murder World: Kaiju Dawn by Jason Cordova and Eric S. Brown, submitted as part of the Hugo Voters' Packet, is one of several books that Campbell nominee Cordova has co-written with Eric Brown. Of course, it's difficult to know how much of the book is due to Cordova's input, but at least it's something to go on.

It's kind of a fun concept - mercenaries are hired to retrieve something from a military ship that crashed on a presumably uninhabited planet, only to crash themselves and discover the planet is full of kaiju - monsters from Japanese sf films. It's chock full of wisecracking fighters - I particularly liked the lethally kickass woman, as you would expect) and full-tilt action scenes and almost everyone dies before the last survivors make it off the planet (with some unexpected help). The characters and situations are walking cliches, the plot is rather formulaic, the craft is adequate to tell a story of this type, but that's about it. It's what I call a guilty pleasure read - there's nothing particularly remarkable about it, but it hits a few of my favourite plot buttons and it's a quick and easy read when you're in the mood for something that does not challenge in the slightest.

Cordova also submitted a shorter and solo piece called "Hill 142." Set in war-torn Europe (there's reference to The Great War) it features another "high concept" - Germans on giant spiders, referred to in the story as the "dreaded German Höllenspinne Division." Fortunately, the allies have giant attack lions on their side. Unfortunately, there are more spiders than lions, but everyone on the right side is courageous and dies nobly after completing their mission.Also unfortunately, the thing that struck me the most was how on earth the human protagonist was able to dismount from his lion twice without an intervening remount. Must have been the heat of battle.

Basing my assessment on these two submissions, Cordova has a future as an SF writer to be sure, and I enjoyed them both, but to me, his work does not rise to the level of previous Campbell winners such as Spider Robinson, C. J. Cherryh, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Bear, Jo Walton, and others.

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie's debut novel, is nothing less than brilliant. It rests on the boundary between milsf, space opera and suspense thriller, a story about a former member of an imperial spacefleet, witness to military atrocities, betrayed by her leaders, on a quest for justice. But the protagonist, now calling herself Breq, is all that remains of an AI that once gave consciousness to both a battleship, Justice of Toren, and a multitude of once-human, mind-wiped and technologically enhanced auxillary units. And Anaander Mianaai, the leader of the Empire known as the Radch (the word means civilised in the language of the Radchaai), who ordered the slaughter and betrayed her is a human consciousness fragmented between a thousand or more cloned bodies, some of which are at war with each other.

For most of the novel, the narrative alternates between the present, in which Breq has finally, after 19 years as a single-bodied consciousness, ready to take action against Anaander, and past events, occurring when the protagonist was still a battle cruiser with ancillary units, but with a focus on the perspective of the ancillary One Esk, who is most fully a witness to the events leading up to the atrocity and betrayal, and who will eventually become Breq.

There is so much more to this novel than unique characters in a fast-paced and tightly plotted space adventure. The multiple bodies and memories of the two main characters raise profound questions about what it means to be human, and how one defines one's identity. Breq's uncertainty about who or what she is and how she fits into human society has a counterpoint in the third significant character - Seivarden, a fugitive drug addict from the Radch, once a junior officer on Justice of Toren over a thousand years ago, who was lost along with her ship during her first command and drifted in deepsleep for centuries before being found and revived into a future she has no connection too.

Then there are all the issues of a failing empire grown huge and unwieldy on too many assimilated star systems, with a cultural secret - a genocide far greater that the slaughter witnessed by Breq, one that threatens to shatter both the mind of Anaander Mianaai and the future of the Imperial Radch.

In among all of these themes and issues, Leckie also forces readers to think about language and gender, when she makes the Radchaai a people who have no concept of gender as a differentiating characteristic between people. They have more than one biological sex, but this is totally irrelevant within their culture. They use only one pronoun, which translates into other languages as "she/her." Lacking an awareness of gender, they do not understand the cues that designate gender in other cultures - leading to some confusion when Breq must guess at gender when speaking to non-Radch, and often make mistakes. It also allows for sentences such as "She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain."

I fell in love with this book and am eagerly preparing to read the second volume of the Imperial Radch trilogy.

Glen Cook

People I know have been raving at me about Glen Cook's The Black Company series for years. So, earlier this year I decided it was time to give them a read. The series is divided into several sections, and follows the history of a mercenary company through about forty years of its history. The company itself has been around for at least 400 years, and the tradition is that one of the company's officers does double duty as the company's Annalist. The conceit of the novels is that in all but one of the books we are reading a section from the annals of the company, and over the course of the series, there are several annalists - giving the novels considerable variation in tone, voice, what kinds of events and observations are selected for inclusion and how they are organised. The exception to this is the fourth volume, which tells of events that happen in the North after the surviving members of the Company decide to travel to the South, where their legends say they came from 400 year ago. The series is constructed as follows:

The Books of the North
The Black Company (Annalist: Croaker)
Shadows Linger (Annalist: Croaker)
The White Rose (Annalist: Croaker)

The Silver Spike (Narrator: Case)

The Books of the South
Shadow Games (Annalist: Croaker)
Dreams of Steel (Annalist: Lady)

The Books of the Glittering Plain
Bleak Seasons (Annalist: Murgen)
She Is The Darkness (Annalist: Murgen)
Water Sleeps (Annalist: Sleepy)
Soldiers Live (Annalist: Croaker)

I must say that I found the series very uneven in terms of readability. The Books of the North were very readable once I got about halfway into book one - the first half of the book was a bit of a slog. Shadow Games was another page-turner, then the series really bogged down for me, until the last two books, which moved at a fair clip.

The story is a complex one, with a large cast of characters, both villains and decent hard-working mercenaries. The characters are extremely well fleshed-out - one of the positive thing about the series is that in between military actions, we get a good look at life as a mercenary - whether officer, grunt, or specialist (i.e., wizard) - under a wide range of circumstances.

In general, I found myself reading this more for the characters than for the story, especially once the action moved into the southern continent and the company comes closer to learning the truth about its origins - which truth, to my mind, was foreshadowed and hinted at far too often for it to be a surprise when the Company members themselves finally discover it. I'm glad I finally read it, and if the long-promised "coda" volume, Port of Shadows, is ever released, I'll certainly read it just to see what happened to the company next.

Steve Perry, The Musashi Flex

After re-reading all of the Matador series books published back in the 1980s and 90s, I discovered that Perry had returned to the Matador universe and had written a prequel that harkened back to the origins of the fighting style used by the Matadors in their revolution. I am pleased to report that the first of the prequels was just as good as the original series. I understand from Wiki that two more prequels are in progress, and I’m waiting for them eagerly.


Linda Evans, Far Side of Darkness

This is a well written and rather enjoyable book. There’s a conspiracy involving scientists and the military and a few other assorted people who want the world to be run their way. There’s a co-opted top secret government project involving time travel. And there’s a group of ordinary people caught up in all of this, accidentally sent through time, who eventually manage to come together and start to figure out what is going on and realise they may be the only ones who can stop it.

But I cannot recommend it, because the book ends on a cliffhanger, with no resolution at all. It was clearly intended as the first half of a tightly-connected duology, and given that it was originally published in 1996, it seems unlikely that the second half will ever be available. So, as things stand, don’t buy it – you will find yourself with a severe case of reading interruptus. That said, if the sequel is ever published – grab both volumes and go for it.


Eleanor Arnason, Tomb of the Fathers
Eleanor Arnason, Mammoths of the Great Plains

Eleanor Arnason is brilliant. She thinks deeply and honestly about things like gender, class, race, colonialism and imperialism, and how they affect her characters and the stories she wants to tell. And then she folds these important considerations into fascinating tales with interesting and multi-dimensional characters. She writes with wit and grace. Her work is thought-provoking and satisfying. I was going to say something about the two Arnason books I read last year, but then I discovered a review by Kelly Jennings at Strange Horizons that says much of what I would have said abut them, so I will direct you there instead:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2010/08/mammoths_of_the.shtml


Lyda Morehouse, Resurrection Code

For those who know Morehouse’s AngeLINK series – this is a must-read. Mouse and Morningstar. Prequel and sequel. Betrayal and redemption. Cyberpunk and angels. Gender fluidity. Prophecy and portent. Everything that Morehouse does so well. For those who do not know the world of AngeLINK – this is probably not the place to begin, but I urge you to try your hardest to find Morehouse’s four previous AngeLINK novels (sadly out of print) and read them. I’ve never been able to understand why these books, which are full of amazing characters, provocative ideas about mind and soul and sex and technology, and complex and satisfying storytelling – all that science fiction at its best is about – have failed to find a wider market. Perhaps it is the moral (and gender) ambiguity of some of the characters – but Morehouse knows that all beings are complex, and contain multitudes and contradictions. If you haven’t figured out by now, I love Morehouse’s work in this series. She has written other books that are a joy to read – under the name Tate Hallaway – but this series truly is her masterwork. And it really should be in print again.

For those who are interested, here is a link to a review of Resurrection Code by Russ Allbery (where you can also find links to his reviews of the other AngeLINK books). http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-935234-09-9.html



Elizabeth Moon, Hunting Party

While I do enjoy some milsf, I tend not to read it as often as I do fantasy, whether high or otherwise. So even though I love Moon’s high fantasy, I had never really made reading her milsf a high priority. However, after finishing the new volumes in the Paladin’s Legacy fantasy series, I found that I wanted more Moon – so I decided to try this, the first volume of volume in her Familias Regnant milsf series. And enjoyed it. The things that I enjoy so much in Moon’s fantasy are there in her sf too – strong female characters, well-paced stories with political intrigue. I intend to read more.


Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

A darkly satirical post-apocalyptic action-adventure comedy which poses serious questions concerning the nature of reality and identity, Harkaway’s first novel is perhaps a bit excessive, but has moments of sheer genius and more than enough energy to pull the reader through the rough spots. To say nothing of the question that is likely in the back of every reader’s mind – what the fuck will he do next? I really can’t easily describe it – just check it out for yourself.

The Outback Stars, Sandra McDonald.

This is the first novel in a space opera/milSF trilogy with a strong female protagonist and a universe in which Australia gets to be the basis for an interstellar civilisation. And it’s a lot of fun. Political intrigue, mysterious alien technology, space pirates, rebellion, spies, vanished civilisations and a judicious splash of romance made this an enjoyable read for me.

I particularly enjoyed the early section of the novel, in which the protagonist, Lt. Jodenny Scott, services and supply specialist, arrives on a new and clearly trouble-ridden ship and is assigned a mid-level command position in one of the most dysfunctional departments on board. It is in some ways a bit of a clichéd situation, but the attempts of the hero to get to the bottom of what’s rotten in the face of military protocol, closed ranks, and corrupt officers is both realistic and fascinating.

The other really interesting element in the book is the mystery of the ancient alien instantaneous interstellar transport technology that humans have been using without understanding much about how it works and what it is capable of, which is of course the big mystery that awaits our hero after she deals with spies, rebels, and corrupt officers. I am really looking forward to finding out more about the – supposedly – long-vanished alien civilisation that left this system in place for humans to find.

Beyond the Australian flavour of the setting and of Jodenny’s experiences with the mystery alien transport system, there isn’t really a lot that’s new in this book, but all the elements are put together in such a way as to provide a pleasing space romp.