Tag: science fiction

Review: Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison

I did not know Harlan Ellison until some time ago. I had read some his work in anthologies or magazines, but I never really pay attention to names.

But then I noticed this collection of short stories, and I realized he’s the author of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, and thought I’d give it a chance.

Mostly, I’m convinced short stories are the format for speculative fiction.

Sure, I enjoyed the whole saga of Herbert’s Dune, or Asimov’s Foundation cycle. but I mostly like ideas, and a short story gives you that in a few pages instead of hundreds.

Anyway, this is an interesting collection; Ellison is an author of his time, and he perfectly embeds the New Wave style of science fiction (experimental writing, social critique, a penchant for shocking the reader). You may like this or not, but I think it’s worth reading it just to get yourself acquainted.

The Stories

I forgot to write this review soon after the book, so by this point I’ve already forgotten some of them… so these are some I do remember.

“Repent, Harlequin,” Said the Ticktockman (1966)

A classic tale of The Fool fighting against the establishment, the broken cog in the perfect machine, the rebel, the joker. I think this is written in an interesting way, but not particularly interesting plot-wise. Stephen King recycled the Ticktockman in his Dark Tower saga (book 3, “Wastelands”), and I think he did it mostly cause it’s just a cool name.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967)

One of the most famoys SF short stories, probably in the top 5 of most memorable ones (I’ll let you pick the others, but I have my choices, if you ask).

It’s harsh, and depressing, and everybody should read it.

The Deathbird

I think the author wanted to tell me something and I didn’t understand it. This one won a ton of awards, but for me it was “meh”.

Jeffty Is Five

Without too many spoilers, the story follows a kid who’s friend with Jeffty, and, well, Jeffty is always five years old. I cannot express how good this story is. It’s deeply moving and by far the better in the collection IMO, even tho the idea is so simple it is completely contained in the title. A masterpiece.

Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes

A great short “amazing stories” kind of tale, palate cleanser.

Mefisto in Onyx

This one also won some awards, also a fun “amazing stories” kind of tale. Follows a telepath who goes to visit a mean on death row, to actually confirm whether he’s guilty or not. Good story.

The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

Look, the title is better than the story. It’s a deeply experimental composition with no linear narrative, and while I can agree it’s good literature, I’m not convinced it’s good SF. Wikipedia has the whole plot so you can go read it.

How Interesting: A Tiny Man

Another wonderful simple idea: a scientist creates a tiny man, which is initially considered a fun novelty, and then a target of hate. Very good story, very good writing.

Conclusion

I listened to this in audio form, and Harlan Ellison himself narrates most of it. Ellison was an odd person, and he reads the stories with so much emphasis as to almost be distracting. which in some ways compounds the effect of the stories, and in some others is just, well, annoying.

Still, he’s the author, so that’s how they should be read, perhaps.

I feel some of the stories have lost their power over time, and on the other side some may seem uncouth to modern readers, but I think anyone who claims to like SF should read them.

Also, again, the Jeffty story is wonderful and worth the price of the book by itself.

Vote: 7.5/10, Solid book, plenty of good stories, some iconic ones.

Micro Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

I was reminded of this book while reading the short story The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, which was reprinted in Trigger Warning.

I realized I’ve read very little of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, and I thought I should fill this void a bit.

Given the crazy amount of stuff he wrote, I would have been troubled to choose. Likely, this one has the catchiest title.

In some ways, it was exactly the story I expected: Small Town America gets in touch with capital case Evil. A Carnival is involved, which seem to be a scary thing in US pop culture, like clowns. Or perhaps they started being scary with this story, it’s hard to tell.

The story has kids in it, so, to me, it felt like going home. How many stories I’ve enjoyed, of kids dealing with the supernatural in small american towns? From King’s “IT” to Netflix’s “Stranger Things”, I’ve visited this topos a hundred times.

And as usual, I enjoyed it. I didn’t find this book particularly original (could be a case of Once Original, Now Common), but it is certainly well written and entertaining, the characters are lively and the dialogs feel real. I also feel I missed some sub-text and meanings, so I welcome anyone who’d like to point me to some literary analysis of the work.

It did not leave me wanting for more tho, so I think it’ll be a while before I move on to other Bradbury works.

Vote: 6.5/10, good, just not as good as I expected.

Micro Review: Way Station

I don’t have proof, but I think the ’60s had the best sci-fi. Looking at the list of Hugo Award for best novel there’s not a book in the ’60s which isn’t absolutely great. But I have not read them all, so I decided to pick up the missing ones.

I think this one is free if you have an audible subscription, so if audiobooks are your thing give it a go.

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak is one I missed. The premise is quite original: Enoch Wallace is an American civil war veteran who ends up managing an interstellar traveling station in his house, apparently made immortal, and being more in touch with aliens who pass by than with his own world.

I won’t give spoilers, but the book seems to have a few ideas that may have deserved a better exposition, and some things seem just a bit forced. Enoch is a wonderful character, but there’s basically little else.

Still it’s a an original and optimistic piece from 80 years ago, and I enjoyed it.

Vote: 6.5/10, you can’t go wrong with the ’60s sci-fi

Micro review: The Atrocity Archives (The Laundry Files, book 1)

I like Charlie Stross in general, I really enjoyed Accelerando, and many people talked positively about The Laundry Files, so I decided to give it a go.

I like the universe, where unspeakable horrors exist and governments have secret departments in charge of keeping the world safe. I like this premise already.

But it’s a well trodden trope, and what differentiates this from, say, Hellboy, or Man in Black§ is that it’s crossed with the “bureacracy rules the world” meme.

These aren’t your all-action cool guys with magic weapons and super boomsticks, these are the policemen at the embassy when you try to renew your passport. It’s a government job, it has its own quirks, but it’s not glamorous.

Given all these premises, I should have loved the book, but I didn’t.

I found it pretty predictable, the humor uninspired and a bit too much of the “I know about IT, so here’s a joke about it, wink wink” stuff.

This is a pretty long series so it may get better in later books§, but I’m not sure I’m going to give it another try.

Vote: 6.5/10, not great, not as bad as things from the dungeon dimensions.

Micro Review: The Peripheral

When it came out, I started watching Amazon’s show based on this book, and I felt it was probably the best new Sci-Fi show to come out in many years. I didn’t have much hope it would end as good as it started, but I didn’t have the chance to be disappointed: Amazon show was cancelled after one season.

So I thought, well, I’m going to read the book. I’ve read a few books by William Gibson (namely, all the sprawl trilogy, some of the bridge trilogy, and some random stories), and I have a positive memory of that, although an hazy one.

So I proceeded to get the Audiobook version of The Peripheral, which in turn is the start of another trilogy§.

What the book is about

Spoilers ahead.

The Peripheral setting is a rural backwater in a future post-civil-war USA, which would be interesting by itself. But this is William Gibson, so there are layers and layers of interesting world building.

So the people in this world are contacted from an even further future where the human population has shrunk to minimal numbers due to some events referred to as “the jackpot“. Gibson hates being obvious so the jackpot is not a single event, (e.g. global warming, aliens) but an unspecified list of “many things went wrong and here we are“.

The post-jackpot world has developed two interesting technologies: one that allows people to operate a remote body (the peripheral of the title), and one which allows connecting to a point in the past. Of course, someone had the idea of combining the two, so they sent information in their past to build a controller that can operate a peripheral in their time.

Even this would be interesting on its own, but what makes it more interesting (Gibson!) is that every time a connection is made, time bifurcates, so the timeline in the past is not connected to the future timeline anymore.

So, what is the effect of someone with superior technology being able to act on a remote playground with no consequences? Well, a sort of colonialism, of course. Post-jackpot people even developed a vocabulary to detach them from this colonized pasts, so that they call each past a stub, not even granting it the dignity of considering a timeline.

In medio stat tedium

I have no complaint about the narration, but going through the book I remember why I have not read more of Gibson’s works. I don’t like them.

William Gibson is, in my humble opinion, a genius. A lot of what he writes is prescient, the themes are original, the world building is masterful. I want to know more about this world. I want to have more insightful thinking and exposition.

Gibson is also, for what I can judge, very good at writing characters. I can see the main character, Flynne Fisher, just ad I could see Molly Millions in Neuromancer.

But Gibson is, for my taste, terrible at writing plots. As I read to the end of the book, I tried to remember what happened in it, and I could not. As I remember, something happens that sets things in motion (future contact). something happens that closes the plot (bad people get what they deserve, good people are happy) but I have no idea about what happened in the middle. It’s just flyover country, boring stuff I need to get through to finish the book.

And I suddenly realized this is also what I remember of Neuromancer and Idoru. I do not know why. I have clear visions of specific scenes and paragraphs and characters, but I have no idea of what things actually happened.

BTW, I feel the Amazon show deviated from the book in good ways and was far more interesting, and it’s a pity it was cancelled. It had a heck of a good cast too!

So, if you already liked Gibson, go read this because you’ll love it. If you can get through a few hundred pages just for the sake of the world building, you’ll also like this. As for me, I won’t be reading the following books in the trilogy. Until In forget about this again, anyway.

Vote: 6.5/10, I wish this was a tv show.

Mini Review: The Road

I’ve watched a bunch of post-apocalyptic content when I was a kid.

I grew up with post-apocalyptic anime of the desert kind and of the non-desert kind (Italy in the ’80s was a weird place where everything animated was supposed to be for kids).

And post-apocalyptic movies were a staple in ’80s and ’90s: the Mad Max movies sure, but also The Salute of the Jugger, Waterworld, The Postman, 12 Monkeys…

I think this was mostly related to the fact that film makers back then had been really, really scared of atomic bombs growing up.

I think my generation was afraid of ecological collapse of some kind, but not as much. Might be the reason why we didn’t get a nuclear war, but we are getting an ecological collapse.

Mild spoilers ahead!

Anyway, The Road by  Cormac McCarthy is the story of a man and his son living in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to go south hoping not to die of cold.

It’s incredibly bleak. If you watched any Mad Max movie, the world is generally fucked up, dried up, and life only survives in a few spots dominated by violence and such. But you see, life goes on, it’s our current world which is fucked. We don’t consider ourselves a post-apocalyptic dinosaur story§.

In this book, life does not go on. Everything is dead. There are no surviving trees, no animals, no fish. Mankind survives on tin cans, and you know those will run out too, and so do they.

This would be sad and depressing on its own, but the hardest thing of the book is that this is the story of a father and a small boy.

The father knows they’re going to die too, and so does the boy. They go through the motions of surviving, but they know (or, you do) that canned food won’t last forever. Maybe they’ll find a cache of some sort of nutrition). But then what happens when that is over?

They have a gun with two bullets, and they have to choose whether to use them to protect themselves or kill themselves when things get too bad. But as a father, what do you do? You can’t kill your kid while there’s hope he won’t die.

And there’s always hope. In Italian we say “la Speranza è l’ultima a morire” (~ “Hope dies last”), and one wonders who died before her. The answer is You. You die before Hope dies.

So the father goes through the motions of living, teaching the kid that they are The Good Guys, and they Carry The Fire. The father does not generally lie to the kid, but you can feel he’d like to.

Well, I‘d like to at least. Lies are bad, but what do you tell a kid when he cries at night? I’ll be there for you, I’ll protect you forever, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. But you don’t have the power to hold that promise.

By chance, I also happened to be reading a different book to my son yesterday, and it’s an amazingly good book§, with many good stories, and one had this bit:

– how much does a teardrop weight?

– it depends: the teardrop of a spoiled kid weighs less than the wind, the teardrop of a hungry kid weighs more than the whole Earth.

And we sometimes forget this, but it is true.

This is a perfect book. It’s short, it’s well written, the story is gripping, the characters are three dimensional and faceted. I believe it’s also part of the free library for Audible subscribers, so if you have a subscription go check it out.

Vote: 10/10, I wish I had read this before having kids.

Micro Review: Permutation City

This book by Greg Egan  had been on my todo list for years, I kept forgetting it and rediscovering it and thinking it sounded great, but then not reading it anyway.

In short, it’s a story about virtual worlds, uploaded minds, the meaning of consciousness, what it means to live in a simulation, and how to know if you do.

These are topics which are very fashionable in the 2020’s, but this book was written in 1994, the author was way ahead of his time.

It is not a super-easy read, but it will give you a lot to think about. Some of that lot is deeply tragic and depressing, but I guess it depends on how you read it.

Maybe don’t read it if you’re depressed.

I listened to this in audiobook form from Audible, and tbh I hated the narration. But hey, maybe it’s just me.

Vote: 7/10, read it before uploading your mind.

Mini review: Bobiverse audiobooks 1-4

I am not sure how I got into these audiobooks, but I think it’s because the premise was pretty great: Bob is a software developer that gets his mind uploaded into a Von Neumann probe, a spacecraft that travels the universe replicating itself.

This poses a few interesting issues: how does such a human survive as disincorporated mind? How does he deal with the solitude of space? How does it deal with clones that have his exact thought process?

It also creates interesting issues for the writer: how do you write about traveling through the endless vacuum in an interesting way? How do you create contrast between copies of the same character? And if Bob is now just software, when it gets copied to another machine, is it the same?

Hic Sunt Spoilers

Well, the plot issues are handled easily: you Marty Sue the shit out of them. Bob builds its own virtual reality. Its own AIs. Its own faster than light communication and drives. He masters computer science, material science, physics, biology, agronomy, astronomy. He terraforms, creates life, alters solar systems.

Most problems boil down to being barely an inconvenience, except for the issue most males have struggled during the ages: getting the girl. Women, uh?

(This is ironic, don’t lynch me please)

The writing issues are often sidestepped: there is no void of space, Bob just never gets bored or just sleeps. There are never N copies of the same character, since there is always some drift. You can’t copy a Bob.

I liked the idea that you can never have two copies of the same personality (because “quantum“), but if you turn one off, then you can move it to another machine.

It’s a good enough solution for the well known issue that the teleportation is incompatibile with a unique soul, which I expect will be tackled by some future interstellar council (I hope the ensuing schismatics/heretics will be called Renziani, whatever their position).

Anyway, the books are entertaining, Bob acts as God to some creatures, screws up some stuff, fights battle, kills aliens, deals with conspiracies. The various incarnations of Bob are likeable, no doubt due to a good performance on part of the narrator.

There’s also a certain amount of “here’s a new chapter and a new issue, and here’s how I tackle with my smarts” which can either get on your nerves or entice you depending on how much you identify with the character.

The author winks a lot to a certain reader, filling the book with nerd references which can be nice, but it gets boring after a while. Not as bad as Ready Player One anyway.

My ending is better

I liked the fourth book the most. The Bobs go looking for a lost Bob and find a giant space structure where an alien civilization is kept in a permanent state of low-tech development. Not wanting for anything, but stagnating, ignorant of their status, and slowly devolving.

Here the Bobs go on an adventure and find a giant computer mind that manages the whole civilization for their own good. Having incarnated into robots, the Bobs travel the planet, meet people, do stuff, start revolutions and so on.

This is my favorite book as the author seems to have abandoned the somewhat gimmicky nature of the first three, and gives us a cool space adventure, interesting world building, characters with mode depth. I think it might have made a good standalone book even leaving the Bobiverse aside completely.

My only disappointment is that I really, really, really wanted the evil computer mind to be the lost Bob. This would have cast a shadow on previous choices the Bobs did, forcing the reader to face hard ethical choices. Alas, we just get a “everybody is happy” ending.

Still, it’s nice to have happy endings now and then, and I look forward to the next book.

Vote: 7/10

Mini review: Stand on Zanzibar

I just finished reading (well, listening) Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. It won the Hugo Award, and has often been mentioned both by casual readers and by SF authors a must read, so I decided to give it a go.

I didn’t like it very much, but read till the end. Some minor spoilers included.

stand on zanzibar (audible thumbnail)

The Good & The Bad

The world building is pretty good, and the author uses the trick of having whole sections of jumbled up snippets, like zapping through TV channels, so that you get a bunch of advertisement, news reel and so on.

This is of course a common trope (my favourite Shaun of the Dead scenes plays on this) but it allows the writer to just give a ton of depth while avoiding character infodumping. It does not work too well on an audiobook, alas.

The plot lines are much of the same tho. We have multiple things happening, only tangential to each other.

There’s the megacorp that wants to develop something huge in Africa. There’s the afram (sic) manager which has risen quickly in the company ranks using his ethnicity. There’s the super-AI owned by the megacorp which is unable to approve the plans because they’re based on what it thinks are invalid assumptions. There’s the rising power of China with its own super-AI. There’s government-enforce eugenics, genetic manipulation, buying kids and baby farming in underdeveloped countries. The rise of a new power in south-east Asia. There’s the media controlling narrative and people living in their own bubble. There’s the truth-sayers which speak of the dangers of everything and are not censored, but they are basically ignored.

But, again: there’s so much stuff, and so little unity. I am not saying it’s badly written. It’s written perfectly. It’s just that I have not cared for this style since I hit 30.

The awesome

But wait, let’s go back to the worldbulding: it’s a really good world, and it holds together, and it feels very predictive, and modern and speaking a lot about our society.

But it was published in 1968. This means it is closer to World War I than it is to today. It’s a time when computers were in their infancy, and black&white TVs were still outselling the Color ones.

The author hit so many targets that it’s honestly mindblowing. And the writing still feels fresh and not dated at all.

So, I didn’t like this book very much, but I have to say: maybe read it anyway.

Vote: 6.5/10

PS

The AI, Shalmaneser, refuses to predict the economic results of the company’s projects in Beninia. I tried asking ChatGPT, and, alas, it also refused. So, mark one more point for the author.