Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis by Yoshikazu Takeuchi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I figured it was about time I read the original light novel that inspired the fantastic anime of Perfect Blue, and I wasn't let down.

This is very much an interior-focused version, and I appreciate how it flenses the whole subgenre of stalker-horror. Half celebrity-abuse (or even just highlighting how all young people are abused for just wanting to be popular), and half an obsession/entitlement indictment, this particular story seems to be all too commonplace in real life. Give or take this skin bits, of course. But damn. Just look at us. Our whole society is sick as hell.

Just look at the fans.

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The Many by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These days, I tend to expect a hive-mind type of story to be either a horror the way propaganda wants me to hate socialism horror kind of way or something extremely mild the way propaganda wants me to love socialism kind of way.

What? Hive-mind is a METAPHOR? No way. Noooooo waaaayyyyyyy.

But yeah, I didn't mind this one. I mean, let's face it, the world is split between those who are willing to walk a mile in other's shoes and those who would never. Or it put it more succinctly, those who are willing to act on their empathy and those who won't.

This novel is frankly just an enormous almost-apocalyptic novel that moralizes that we should stop trying to trash everything.

Big damn surprise, right? Being nice to others is a GOOD thing? *shock* *awe* And yet, this gold standard seems to be getting further and further away.

I suppose I get why Neuvel wrote this novel. I suppose I even support it.

Just do that one thing to make the world a better place, no matter what it is. Damn right.

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Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think I've grown old. Why? Because this book used to hit hard in my consciousness of social irony. Why? Because I grew up in a hardcore religious background that judged, judged, judged, and more than that, it had the context of religious cues that could turn a novel of hardship into a skewering indictment of social norms.

Back in '84, this probably would have ridden the full wave of religious backlash written as mainstream rebellion. Now? It tries to recall the old oppression, shower us with the logical and honestly moral rebellion against it, and tell us just how much idiocy we had been living in.

Which, in all honesty, I agree with.

Which makes this novel a real throwback simply because it sits on the far side of the fence.

Can I say how much I hate the swing of this pendulum? I'm sure I can, but I feel like most people won't really realize just how much religious zealotry can cause so much damn pain.

But then, here we are, Job. If you know, you know.

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Dissolution by Nicholas Binge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An easy, fun read about memory, time travel, and identity, while feeling like a crossed romance for old people.

And also a technothriller. Which is actually kinda funny when I put these two together. But it is what it is.

Honestly, I had a pretty good time with this. Very engaging. It dragged me in.

As I was reading it, I kept thinking about an old underrated time-travel movie called About Time. It doesn't match up 100%, but for great stretches, it kinda does. :)

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Ascension by RinoZ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Still solid, but with one caveat: it's kinda all over the place and gormless in comparison to the previous four. Those were very solid with plot and direction. All of the books, including this one, has great progression at just the right pacing, but this is the one that seemed to flounder about.

Odd, that. It wasn't bad at all, but I'm comparing like-to-like.

Either way, I love the dead lands and the later battle against the Empire's golds. I can't wait to see where this LitRPG will go from here, or whether it's been written into a corner or not.

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The Henchperson's Guide to Unionizing by Marshall J. Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was frankly interested in this just for the title and perhaps thought that it might be in line with Starter Villain or many other fairly recent books that dive pretty deep in the lives of side-villainous characters coming into their own, usually turning out to be decent people.

I mean, Unionizing? Hell yeah, get that collective bargaining on against all the super evil people out there. We're definitely not using fantasy as subtext here, no sir!

So imagine my sad face when I read about a cozy fiction with minor stakes as if it's all low-paid jobs for bad bosses, only it's Igor and the Bride of Dracula among other well-worn tropes just feeling ill-used and unappreciated even as they try to develop shy friendships and find a way out of loneliness?

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's low-key and slow paced and cozy and probably up a lot of people's alleys. But for me? Give me Zelazny or Scalzi. The plots are generally a lot more interesting. As are the characters.

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Fold Catastrophes by Peter Watts


Short story collection by one of my favorite authors.


Gut Feelings -- (5*) Laugh-out-loud brilliant. Perfect combination of Google-hate, gut-borne cognition programming, and violence investigation, corporation-style. The way it's set up and executed is pure cotton candy to me.


21 Second God -- (4*) I'm a huge fan of runaway tech and warning stories, but this hits several more sweet spots: technological hive-mind, intelligent catastrophes, and the simple fact that we are all, in the end, a bunch of depressed idiots trying to become something more than depressed idiots. Or, at least, this was my own personal interpretation that's still just one valid one among several in this story. Grief, withering, and possible transcendence are more. :)


Contracting Iris -- (3*) Body snatching via microbes. Pretty decent but ultimately forgettable, having been done before. A lot.


Defective -- (5*) Super nerdy first contact stuff in the same universe as Blindsight and Echopraxia. Black hole goodness, BFG's, sun colonization, and impossible conflict. It's depressing, but damn, it's accurate for all that. Hard SF goodness.


Giants -- (5*) Holy crap that's one hell of an imaginative visual/textual trip. Great characters, too. But it really puts the awe in the some. Don't get much SF like that anymore. Cool stuff. Would make one hell of a movie.


Test 4 Echo -- (4*) It's a clever and short thought experiment illustrating the difference between the survival instinct and how it COULD relate to an AI, and the converse. (What causes the survival instinct? Should we build it in, or is it a consequence of consciousness?) As well as being a cool little story on its own.


ZeroS -- (5*) All kinds of awesome. Not just a zombie-consciousness military story right out of Blindsight, but a killer tribute to David Bowie. And since I've been a huge fan of Bowie, the first thing I thought was that each subsection of this novella was a direct reference to Bowie's songs (and they fit, strangely enough, thematically). And I even played the songs in my head as I read.

It's just that cool.


Critical Mass -- (4*) A VERY Peter Watts kind of story. All subconscious SF, art, internal conflict, and an outright art installation destruction investigation. Wild stuff and very obviously him. :)


The Colonel -- (5*) This has just about everything I love in a story much bigger than itself. A standalone that has massive continuations in the Blindsight universe, a massive thematic continuation of this particular set of stories (hive minds), and a deeply human and visceral gut punch story all on its own. And worse, it makes me want to re-read the entire Firefall series again. With relish.


The Wisdom of Crowds -- (5*) Fantastic what-if exercise. And just as ugly as it would be in reality. So, what if a broad selection of humanity could vote a whole city off the world? What would the wisdom of the crowd vote? Muahahahahahahaha


Game Theory -- (5*) This one is courageous and more than a little disturbing on many levels. Crazy enough to have its MC a damnably guilty priest with Conrad's Syndrome, the entire story is placed in a dying Earth that has given up precisely because science has proven we live in a Simulation, even if it is god-like in scope. But Watts doesn't just give us a great setup. He forces us to really come to terms with what we REALLY believe.

Suffering, indeed.


I'm immensely impressed with all of the stories in this collection. Watts is fantastically motivated to weave and interweave all of these main themes in a hard-hitting tapestry, be it distributed intelligence, subconscious thinking, disassociation, or questioning existential reality. All of this would be brilliant even if it wasn't couched in equally excellent hard-SF that's as nerdy as it is gorgeous, but it is both.

Tons of meat and potatoes and rich, rich gravy.

I just wish so much more SF could be like this. Pushing boundaries, asking real questions, being excellent for excellence-sake.

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