“The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” by Becky Chambers

The setting here is a lot like Star Trek … a super-woke version of Star Trek, that is. Everyone, human or alien, is very in touch with their emotions, mental health, and what not. The crew of the tunneling ship (ie. wormhole creator) Wayfarer all have warm and fuzzy relationships with each other, and we get to learn all about their backstories.

Don’t get me wrong; it is indeed a very positive and optimistic view of the future; I wouldn’t mind to live on board myself with such a great group of chums. But for a book … there just is not much to the plot, at all. Just character backstory upon backstory. Plus all the different alien species just kind of started to blend together in my mind.

The most interesting species to me didn’t receive a ton of “screen time” … it was the navigator, a Sianat, whose people get deliberately infected with a mind-altering virus when young, and thereafter refer to themselves as “us/them”. The virus gives them the ability to navigate multi-dimensional space, but also takes away much of their independent identity and shaves away half their life span. Getting up the courage to question their customs and what they have been taught, and make the choice to break away (a cure which kills the virus is readily available, but is considered sacrilege) and thus take back their life is addressed somewhat, and resonated with some of my own experiences in life.

The audiobook narrator pronounced “HE-re-tic” as “he-RE-tic” which bugged me.

“Pushing Ice” by Alastair Reynolds (2005)

I really enjoyed this more than I thought. Very commendable plot that kept moving – new factions and crises continually added all the way to the end.

The action begins in the near future aboard a comet-mining ship called Rockhopper. While they are on a routine mission, Saturn’s moon Janus breaks orbit and starts accelerating in the direction of the star Spica. Apparently it was never a moon at all, but some kind of alien spacecraft! Based on its acceleration, the only chance humanity has of studying it up close before it leaves the solar system is Rockhopper.

As Rockhopper (after some crises and political struggles) approaches Janus, it begins noticing something odd – it is accelerating too! Apparently there is some kind of field around Janus that has caught them in its net. Despite all they can do, escape or rescue is impossible and Rockhopper’s only hope is to land on Janus and try to survive. That’s just what they do, for the 13 year (to them) / 260 year (for Earth – relativity is funny that way) voyage to Spica.

The Rockhopper crew call their Janus hosts the Spicans, even though they are never contacted and never see any of them – apparently Janus is a completely automated ship. Some kind of megastructure awaits them at Spica, but a few months before approaching a kind of roof, called the “iron sky”, is constructed over the surface of Janus by the Spican automated machinery. Not long after they figure they have arrived at the megastructure, a hole is cut in the iron sky and some aliens, the massive, jellyfish-mountain like creatures dubbed the Fountainheads come in to say hello. They are many thousands of years more advanced than the humans, but fortunately they are friendly and share some technology, such as the ability to rejuvenate aging humans and even bring some of them back from death. But they don’t tell the humans much at all about where they are or why – though they do reveal that they aren’t the Spicans, and that other spacefaring races are also present in the megastructure.

Skipping to the punchline, it turns out that Rockhopper is inside what amounts to a vast, abandoned cosmic zoo. And they aren’t at Spica, but inside some other megastructure many millions of light years away. The Spican structure was only an accelerator of sorts to get them as fast as they needed to go. What they figure out is that the Spicans (they continue calling them that for lack of a better term) created many Janus-like ships in order to bring many different alien civilizations together in one place. You see, intelligent life is rare and fleeting in the universe; it appears at random times and different places in the universe. Not many spacefaring civilizations (maybe none) are ever in existence at the same time and place. To get around this, the Spican ships exploit the properties of relativity to bring everyone together at the end of the universe – all of them have traveled different distances and at different speeds, but have arrived at the structure within the same few decades or centuries or millenia at least. Forward-only time travel, I suppose!

Why did the Spicans do this? Who knows. Maybe to fulfill some Star Trek fantasy? The Spicans themselves are confirmed as gone, either of their own accord or perhaps destroyed by some of the zoo’s inmates at some time in the past. What’s left is a bunch of alien species, not all friendly, vying and scheming for survival and (sometimes) escape.

Mixed in with all this world-building based plot is a friendship-turned-rivalry between Rockhopper captain Bella Lind and chief engineer Svetlana Barseghian (one complaint with this audiobook – I really hated the Dracula-like accent he did for Svetlana…); some continuation of Earth politics as China sends its own ship to investigate (interesting how all the Earth scheming just fades away completely from the story as the Rockhopper realizes they are on their own on Janus); and a bizarre far-future Earth, so inspired by the Rockhopper’s self-sacrificial journey even 18000 years in the future that they send them some aid at the end of the universe in the form of a black cube full of morphable femtotech (this was kind of cool but did feel tacked on).

Finally, I’m not sure if it was just a reused plot device or an intentional theme, but there were many instances of some superior concealing knowledge “for your own good”. First, Earth fudges Rockhopper’s fuel tank readings to make the crew believe they have enough gas to get back home – in reality, it seems it always impossible to do anything other than a one-way trip. Then during the journey, when they are still receiving data from Earth, Bella hides traumatic earth events so as to not worry crew with family still there. Then later she doesn’t tell her subordinates about some concerning threats she learns about from the Fountainheads, such as about the Musk Dogs who end up destroying Janus. The Fountainheads themselves are hesitant to say much about the truth about the “zoo” they are all in (letting humans think they are still at the megastructure near Spica). Finally, the future humans also hesitate to share their full power, at first.

And one more theme/revelation from this story – no matter how advanced technology becomes, we’ll never escape politics. There will always be factions pushing for one course or another; learning how to get along while disagreeing is going to be an eternal requirement. (No matter how some may long for the day when heathens are burned away and all that remains are their tribal compatriots!)

“The Girl With All the Gifts” by M. R. Carey (2014)

This book did a good job in the beginning at showing a weird situation and making the reader figure it out. The weird stuff here is a group of young kids locked up in a prison and completely bound and put into wheelchairs before being taken to their school classroom each day. What … ?

Well, turns out those kids are flesh-eating zombies (hello cordyceps) called “Hungries.” There’s something different about them though – they have retained most of their minds and human-like faculties, unlike typical hungries, whose bodies are only vehicles for the parasite to use during the hunt. So, they have been captured by the small remaining uninfected population and are under study in a military camp.

Pretty wild beginning … now can it finish well?

I guess I’ll say, “kind of.” The villain of the story is Dr. Cordwell, the head research scientist, who routinely dissects the hungry kids looking for clues which could lead to a cure or vaccine. On the other side is the kind teacher Ms. Justineau, who has developed a bond with the kids in spite of the danger, particularly one named Melanie. Melanie learns the truth about her existence when the camp is overrun and Dr. Cordwell, Ms. Justineau, Melanie, and two soldiers must flee into the wasteland.

Eventually, after some fairly gruesome adventures, they run into other hungry kids like Melanie, and realize that they represent essentially a new race of humanity – probably the only race which can survive, since cordyceps infection is incurable. Melanie makes a decision to release cordyceps spores into the atmosphere, turning a contact-only infection now into an airborne one, essentially dooming the remainder of uninfected humans. But at the same time, clearing the way to allow hungry kids to thrive as Earth’s new civilization — with the help of their teacher, Ms. Justineau, conveniently ensconced in a germ-proof habitat.

So that’s the ending; my beef is that essentially Melanie, the hero, pulled at the same lever on the train track as Dr. Cordwell, the villain. Both justify killing the few (actually a lot more numerically in Melanie’s case!) for the good of the many. I guess I would have appreciated it if the good/evil natures of these characters were a bit more ambiguous … after all, that’s life.

Plus, I’m not sure what kind of quality of life Ms. Justineau will have, essentially all alone as the last uninfected human … I guess she passes on her knowledge to the kids and sets the stage for civilization, then lets herself go?

“Recursion” by Blake Crouch (2019)

I think the author got the main concept from this book from video games. Specifically, how you can save your game, and reload to get back to a previous save point. In the book, a neuroscientist studying memory creates “the chair”, meant as an immersive memory replay device. Along the way, she stumbles upon a way to actually return to a past vivid memory and relive life from that point. If we can trick our brain into completely reliving a past memory, and then die, we’ll actually go back in time to that point. There’s some mumbo-jumbo explanation about how memory is the only thing really providing us a “direction” for time – all things are really happening simultaneously, yadda yadda. Hmmm…. ok author I’m suspending my disbelief! (Note, the whole dying bit reminded me a bit of the movie “The Prestige.”)

But there’s a catch. When someone jumps back to an old memory, they basically create a new branch of the timeline. The old, “dead memories” are still a valid timeline. When the new timeline reaches the point in time where the old timeline stopped (when someone used the chair to go back in time), suddenly everyone remembers that whole other timeline. Sometimes this is just too much to mentally handle, particularly for cases where that timeline was especially worse or better than the new one. Soon things get out of hand – mass suicides, etc. Worse, nuclear-powered nations declare any detection of chair use to be an affront to their sovereignty, since who knows what tinkering might have been done to affect the global balance of power? Soon, all possible timelines are devolving into global nuclear destruction at the time when everyone “wakes up” to their past timelines.

Confused yet? I thought the concept was kind of cool, but still didn’t quite make total sense. Particularly the resolution, which seemed to break the established rules: why did the protagonist get to keep memories of past timelines, since he was still before the (future) branch point? Why did it being the “original” timeline matter at all – wouldn’t those other branches still exist and still come crashing into everyone’s heads on the fateful date in 2019?

It turns into kind of a love story in the end, which was kind of ugh … getting the characters together didn’t really make much sense to me either.

“Excession” by Iain M. Banks (1996)

An artifact of immense power is discovered in an obscure corner of the galaxy. It’s believed to be a universe escalator of sorts, permitting travel to older or younger universes (that is, universes closer to the Big Bang or to the heat death). This is great, since it offers the possibility for avoiding one’s own fate [heat death of the universe] by traveling en mass to a younger one. However, there’s also great risk: some unfathomably powerful civ from an immensely older universe may decide our own universe is ripe for colonization…

I thought the concept of the Excession as described above was pretty unique and interesting; however the artifact itself turned out to be something of a dud, story-wise. Most of the story is actually about conspiracy and double-crossing amongst Culture AI ship Minds. I must confess I lost track of nearly all these “characters” … they all have quite similar names, in a funny/clever way (“Serious Callers Only”, “Fate Amenable to Change”, “Grey Area”, “Not Invented Here”, …), and I guess I just can’t quite grasp a ship Mind’s motivations and unique traits.

Apparently, sometimes a Mind will go “Eccentric” and kind of do its own thing – like “Sleeper Service”, which offered organic beings the option to go into suspended animation for a time period of their choosing, whilst being utilized as statuary in elaborate dioramas depicting famous battles or other historical events. [How did the author come up with that?!?]

Also, I didn’t care for the main subplot, which involved an unborn child being cut from a womb, which was kind of gruesome. Yet, the same subplot might be considered progressive, in a way … Culture folks can change their gender at will by signaling their glanding computer and giving it some time, so there’s a thing where a couple will [with a few rounds of gender reversal on both sides involved] impregnate each other then both give birth at the same time. The couple in question just had a little falling out during this process.

I did like the parts about the Affront, a species of jovial, tentacled monsters who enjoy causing pain and suffering in lesser beings. But they are cruel in a fun-loving way! I couldn’t help but picture the aliens from the Simpsons as the Affront.

“The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester (1956)

Quite an odd book. The protagonist, Gully Foyle, is somewhat a villain. At the beginning of the story, he’s stranded alone out in a small escape pod in space. Miraculously, a ship comes close enough to signal … but it ignores him and carries on. He swears an undying quest for vengeance against whoever gave the command to pass him by. His survival is unlikely, but he is rescued by a colony of science mumbo-jumbo worshipping asteroid dwellers, who give him a full facial tattoo job as per their custom. After he gets out of there, he faithfully follows through on his vow of revenge, obsessed to the point of doing stuff like cutting out a guy’s heart and hooking him up to machines to keep him alive during questioning, since others have been psychologically tampered with to immediately cause death when certain subjects are broached (like the spy’s suicide pill, but automatic).

Gully Foyle is a lower class spacer mechanic type, with a distinctive creole speaking style. “Pigs, you! I challenge you me!” He sometimes turns this off, which was kind of disappointing – I liked the dialect; it reminded me of the Welsh-isms in “How Green Was My Valley”.

Besides interplanetary colonization within the solar system, the other bit of worldbuilding is the discovery of “jaunting” – a psychic trick whereby one can instantly teleport to a faraway destination. No one can go more then a few thousand miles though; and you have to have been to the destination before. Well, except for our [anti]hero, of course … but that’s later in the story. I kind of thought the whole jaunting bit was kind of distracting to the story of Gully’s revenge … also the weird burning man doppelganger that sometimes appears. Overall a weird story, I guess. Oh, and he finally tracks down the ship captain … who felt such guilt at other things the ship had done that she voluntarily had all her sensory nerves disconnected from her brain.

The ending gets kind of crazy, with a nuclear bomb like material, detonated by psychic waves.

I didn’t like the description of a blind girl, but who could see in both IR and RF … so a notch filter right in the visual spectrum only?? Seems kind of dumb.

“The City and the Stars” by Arthur C. Clarke (1956)

One billion years in the future. Humanity has long ago retreated from the galaxy due to the threat from “the Invaders” and settled back on Earth, indeed in just one single city on Earth called Diaspar. Diaspar, population ten million, is fully enclosed and self-contained. Which is fine, because the rest of the planet is a giant, lifeless desert. The humans in Diaspar are effectively immortal. For most of the time, their minds rest in a waiting state in the city’s Central Computer. But, every so often according to some schedule planned by the Computer, a mind is brought out and downloaded into a freshly-made body. Human bodies, like everything else in the city, are created via Star Trek-style replicators. They last about 1000 years before being “retired” when their consciousness is uploaded back into the computer. During their lifetimes, the citizens spend their time creating and discussing art, and playing Star Trek-holodeck style VR video games (called “sagas”).

Alvin, our hero, wonders if there is more to life than this. He is intensely curious about what it is like outside the city – a concept which, just to think about, completely horrifies all other citizens (which in itself is very curious too!). Eventually he makes it out … and finds that the citizens have not quite been told the truth.

I’ll leave it to Wikipedia for a full plot synopsis. Turns out humanity’s ancestors were worried, not about any actual Invaders, but about the general concept of Things Going Wrong Somehow. So they retreated to the city (well, some adventurous enough set off for another galaxy entirely) and psychologically altered everyone’s mind to be content where they were and averse to thoughts of leaving. I thought it was similar to Asimov’s “The End of Eternity” in a way – humanity stagnates due to lack of problems to struggle through. Though here the stagnation was enforced directly rather than indirectly via “time police”.

Good writing, and I liked it up until the last twist when Alvin visits the Seven Stars. The reality (a galaxy emptied out due to humanity’s timidity) was kind of anti-climatic.

I was impressed by Clarke’s prescient portrayal of a few now-very-common tropes: minds stored in computers; virtual reality games. Also the robot … Alvin encounters an ancient robot who used to belong to a fraudulent cult leader. The robot was programmed by its old master not to reveal certain secrets until the prophesied Armageddon occurred. Flummoxed, Alvin turns to the Central Computer for help. It probes the robot’s mind to find out what that Armageddon would look like, then whips up a VR scenario and places the robot in it. Robot’s sensory inputs match expected Armageddon scenario, so it unlocks the secrets which Alvin wants. I thought it was a sophisticated portrayal of computers, actually – at least an sophisticated AI vs a more rudimentary adding machine.

“Shards of Earth” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2021)

Quite an interesting bit of galaxy-building in this one. Humanity has spread through the stars, and alien civilizations are plentiful. Unfortunately, a few decades ago, incredibly large crystalline spacecraft appeared out of the middle of nowhere and advanced on human planets, using gravity weapons to transform them into grotesque abstract art. Sadly this “architecting” leaves the planets no longer habitable and billions die. There’s no way to counter the Architects’ weapons, and no way to communicate with them to even find out why they are attacking.

Some humans develop a genetically-modified race of female clones, called the Parthenon, to staff the space navy and gallantly buy time for targeted planets to evacuate at least some of their populations. Meanwhile, almost by accident a rare type of telepathic link is discovered which seems to permit a very limited communication with the Architects. A crash program, involving dangerous drugs and brain surgeries (killing 90% of volunteers) is established to train a corps of these “Intermediaries.” Eventually a group of Intermediaries reach an Architect with a simple message: “We are here.” The Architect immediately departs the system and are not heard of again. Could it be they just didn’t realize they were hurting anything?

Oh, and the Intermediaries are able to navigate through “unspace”, this book’s answer to the FTL travel problem. Not sure if I remember why this ability has anything to do with the Architects … maybe that will be revealed in later books?? Anyway, if you are awake during an unspace voyage, your ship appears completely deserted – you are the only lifeform there. But still you sense some malevolent presence … outside, stalking the ship. It’s very unnerving so everyone opts for sleep beds during the unspace portions of travel. Except the Intermediary – he has to stay awake.

Our Intermediary in this tale, Idris, is cursed from his surgical “enhancements” to never be able to sleep. And he has some PTSD from the Architect war, in which he was part of the group that made first contact with the Architect. Now, he’s working on a scrappy little freighter, which is unimportant in the grand scheme of things but at least the odd-ball, rag-tag crew is like a family.

Some key antagonists in the tale are the Hegemony, a multi-race civilization led by the Essiel, giant space clams. There are rumblings of an Architect return, and somehow the Hegemony are able to provide effective, planet-wide defense against Architects via some ancient “Originator” artifacts, but first you have to swear allegiance to the clams. Some human planets have done so.

I won’t spoil the plot for this rather new book any further. I’ll just say that it is one of the most action-packed books I’ve read in a long while. Unfortunately, I actually thought it was too much … there wasn’t much time for any slow-burn buildups or character development. I kind of lost track a few times coming back to the book remembering what predicament the crew was in now, who they were fighting, or what they were trying to do. Still, though, the galaxy-building was top-notch.

“Forever Peace” by Joe Haldeman

Despite the similar-sounding titles, this is not at all a sequel to Haldeman’s “Forever War”. That one was a far-future fight against aliens while this one is a war-on-terror-esque campaign against a collection of outgunned third world countries.

The main weapons in this war (for the USA) are soldierboys, robotic death machines remote-controlled by “jacked-in” operators ala “Avatar”. (Not sure what they do when comms are lost … that’s kind of glossed over!) Along with “Avatar”, the soldierboys also reminded me of the Black Mirror episode “Men Against Fire” – basically, the soldiers are trained and taught that the enemy is much more depraved and “Evil” than they really are.

Anyway, the soldierboy operators are jacked together in groups of a dozen or so. When jacked, they share not only all sensory information but thoughts, emotions, etc. They really get to know one another, in other words! The military limits jacked time to 2 weeks, otherwise the operators will go insane. Or so they are told! We discover that, really, if jacked longer then a permanent “humanization” of their minds occurs – they learn perfect empathy and violence is no longer permitted by their brains. Obviously bad if you are in the military business. But, a few optimistic souls embark on a plot to humanize the whole of humanity, since otherwise species suicide in some war is inevitable.

There’s more to the plot; actually it kind of gets a little crazy in the last third after somewhat plodding along in the first part (waaaaay too much “jacked sex” descriptions in that first part…). Along with the secret plot to humanize the military, there’s a universe-ending experiment that must be stopped, and a crazy doomsday cult that would rather it did end. (The universe that is.)

“How High We Go in the Dark” by Sequoia Nagamatsu

An interrelated series of short stories (all with a Japanese or Japanese-American connection) revolving around hopelessness in the face of an Ice Age plague uncovered by melting permafrost, a cancer-like virus which nonsensically repurposes bodily organs to lethal effect.

The standout story came early on: a theme park for terminal kids, where the last ride is on an euthanasia coaster…yikes! Really sad idea of parents with absolutely nothing to give their kids but one last day of fun followed by relief from their suffering.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book kind never regained the heights attained in the coaster story. (Hehe, get it?) Several stories showcase how the plague would cause the economy to be controlled by a massive funeral home industry (such as elegy hotels, where survivors get to hang out with their recently departed loved ones); I just think that idea is a tad ludicrous. For one thing, I can’t remember which story provided the numbers but it showed the world death rate in the book was worse than COVID-19 only by an order of magnitude. Would be bad, sure; but maybe not so world-shattering. And another thing…not sure if funeral homes will ever drive the economy, simply because the dead don’t care and the living will always prioritize base survival needs over honoring the dead.

Then it gets weird: a black hole inside a scientist’s head that they use to power an interstellar ship? Some dimensionless realm full of the souls of the dying, who come together despite their suffering to help one survive? Mystical god-like beings who create Earth(s) ad infinitum for kicks? Kind of got off the rails, I think.