Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis by Bradley W. Schenck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is another in the recently growing trend to update and display the adventuresome glories of the SF of yesteryear!

... and I have to admit that it's a rather fun ride. :)

Dash!

Where else can you find a hero's name quite so dashing? And then there are the funny bits.. and there are quite a few funny bits. I personally LOVED the world's smallest Giant Robot. He not only grew on me, but he became a very cool and well-rounded character in his own right. :)

But mostly, this is all a straight adventure that takes us to through Spider Gods and massive robot slave empires and a perfectly reasonable main plot mystery revolving the lost jobs of the switchboard women who I could almost see wearing hairnets and be being totally 1930's prim.

But most of all, there is a lot of love for all the classic adventures and the time period, the optimism, the sheer delight of funny and sometimes really fascinating personal tech, the excitement and thrill of getting your ear blown off, the sting of rejection letters sent from fiction editors.

Not only is our intrepid hero a dashing private-eye-ish adventure hero, but he also writes. :) Gotta love it. :)

RETROPOLIS! :)

What can I say? I had fun. Very cool SF/mystery mashup that updates the tech but brings us right back into a more hopeful SF time.



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Outsystem by M.D. Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Honestly, this reads like a pretty good checklist for story items that seem to be very popular these days, all or mostly encapsulated in the flashy cover:

Hot Chick who's a Badass. A couple of thousand years in the future, with all the military hardware that'll bring. Terrorism. Military life. Spaceships. Snarky AIs. Fast-plot, episodic, steady increase, new challenges, cliffhanger.

If it hadn't been for the fact that it was a fine read, I'd also say it was pure boilerplate. I mean, it basically has all the checklist I'd look for in a grand 'ole space opera done to today's specifications, and so it is. It seems to be popular, too.

So why didn't I give it 5 stars? Because while it was entertaining and fast and popcorn fiction, there wasn't really anything to it that screamed originality.

Fun. Yes. Stand-out? I don't really think so. Fine to waste a lazy afternoon, but nothing I'd scream at people to read as if this is the second coming of whatever. Still, it's flashy and fast and snarky and that is the name of the game these days.



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The Affirmation by Christopher Priest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh, now, this is a rare gem! :)

The blurb does NOT do it justice. Rather, try to follow me here, because this could get rather twisty, but what we've got is what seems to be a rather self-absorbed man trying to come to terms with personal tragedy, writing a manuscript that is all about learning who he is and getting over a girl, but it soon becomes an adventuresome trip through a bunch of very interesting islands, him having won the gift of immortality through a lottery ticket.

The world-building is all kinds of wonderful and there's very little big action in the novel beause it's fully content to remain introspective, thoughtful, and exploratory. We have two women that feature prominently. One is in the past and the other is one he discovered on his trip through the islands on the way to the clinic that would give him his won immortality.

So far, so good.

However, this is where memory and reality start getting wonky. He discovers that the place he wrote of in his manuscript is all a lie, a fake, but it's our modern London. The islands are "real" in every sense of the word and the new girl and the clinic are getting increasingly frustrated with him, but to make things even worse, this "immortality" treatment makes you forget everything and you have to work your way back.

So should he trust the manuscript or the people who are nursing him back to health?

Delicious storytelling. And it only gets much, much worse, speeding up the reveals in a way that's worthy for any fan of Philip K Dick OR very deep pyschological thrillers, reality benders, SF-element traditional fictions, or any wonderful texts that explore the nature of madness from within the mind of the insane.

Of course, this book is even more beautiful because there's NO definitive answer. Is this or that real? Is anything? Is he mad? Is the world he dreamed up (ours, btw,) fake?

Totally awesome.

This kind of read always gets my mind pumping, and even though the text itself is always as clear as glass, Christopher Priest manages to pull off one of the twistiest tales I've ever read. So good! :)

This is the third book I've read of his, from The Inverted World to The Prestige, and this one might be my favorite for it's equal portions of clarity and confouding reveals. In it's own way I think it's superior to The Prestige, even though I loved that one a LOT.

I don't know. Perhaps I just love reality/memory bendy stuff more than anything else. :)

Totally awesome. :)

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From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean Carroll
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is some very impressive stuff.

I've read a lot of nonfiction science books that sometimes had equations but mostly did not, but what I really wanted was a cohesive drive, an arrow to spear right through some of the biggest questions of our time... such as What Is Time.

Sean Carroll manages to keep things very sharp between what is perfectly understood and all of the theories that are somewhat understood, and the other Cosmology stuff that's mostly just baffling. :)

Any way you look at it, though, this is not a book that gets derailed or goes off into super strange directions. He lays out all the foundations, from the opening definitions of Time and what we think it means, from the average to the rather advanced notions of space-time and curvature, Einstein's energy equation, speed of light, diliation, moving all the way to Black Holes. This is very solid stuff.

Plus, we have a very coherent definition of Time as Entropy, showing us just how complicated it can get when time's arrow might just be the illusion that Hawking says it is. I really enjoyed that discussion.

Of course, we come up with lots of possibilities and digressions that are always explored in SF, too, but most of these are just bylines, moving quickly by the Grandfather paradox, etc, to get right back on the main track.

Yes. We have Equations. :) Fortunately, the author does a very good job about explaining them and even getting deeper into the extra areas that made this rather more interesting for me since I've read many science books and have heard most of this already.

I recommend this for anyone interested in Time. :) Not time management. Just Time. :) We do touch rather heavily upon Cosmology by the end, too, which was a blast and a half, getting into many-universes theory and string theory, to name a few. And he makes it clear! :)

Seriously. This was some sharp stuff. Very readable. It's not a general overview. You might say it's putting time's arrow right through the heart of a big question and staying on track all the way to the end.


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Ancient Heavens by Robert E. Vardeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

As I was reading this, I was beset with a number of problems. The first being that it appeared to be tied to Vardeman's fantasy series, the second being that I was only given this book 3 days to read before it gets archived. So, freaking out, I made a couple of conclusions... the first being that I don't have to read the rest because this appears to be straight terraforming SF with no fantasy involved, and the second being a non-starter because I read fast.

That being said, I plowed through it with quite a bit of enjoyment!

This came out 5 years before Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, but it shares SOOO MUCH IN COMMON that I was both nostalgic and rather amazed, making me think about all the other SF authors who had done terraforming fiction with so much science and verve and I just couldn't think of any, so now this guy has got my attention.

Vardeman got so much right! :) Of course, he's working with a nearby star system rather than Mars, but that doesn't matter to me. The fact that he focuses on both story and the science is the thing!

Yes, it kinda felt like a Greek tragedy at times and other times it felt like the blurb was going to make it a lot more cheesy by the end than it really was.. and that's another thing! I do NOT like the blurb here for this novel. It cheapens the fact that so much story actually occurs and the world-building is rather impressive if heavy-handed in places.

I'm giving a lot of that a big long pass, because I remember Red Mars doing a lot of the same damn thing and yet BOTH of these belong in the same category and same level of world-building. Granted, Red Mars is clearly the winner, but I am not going to ignore the fact that this was very decent and comes nearly to the same heights as the other, later, novel.

Hats off! Respect!

On a purely story note, however, there's a number of plot holes I wish weren't there, but none of them are so bad as to make me dislike anything as a whole. :)

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One by Neil Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm honestly boggled by how much I loved this collection of short stories. Clarke put together a really great anthology and I feel edified and thrilled about almost every single one of these.

There's a lot of extra-sol colonization stories, each and every one of them very different in tone and complexity, but all of these were pretty awesome. I was rather surprised and awed by the level of both science and the complexity of the stories.

There were also some really fantastic AI stories with one dovetailing into a robot story with "Today I am Paul" and especially that gem of a story, "Cat Pictures Please".

I've read a few of them from this collection already, but they're still great, like "Folding Beijing".

What I was pretty thrilled about, in general, was reading Geoff Ryman, David Brin, and Seanan McGuire, but I was even more pleasantly surprised by the stories by Yoon Ha Lee and Sean McMullen.

In fact, I think I've just discovered some of my absolute favorite new unknown authors through this book! It's crazy. I've been reading so many novels and just a handful of short stories all this time, completely missing out on a whole WIDE FIELD OF AWESOMENESS. I've got to get EVERYTHING by Sean McMullen now. It's crazy. This is like a NEED for me, now. :)

There were a few I didn't really care for, but I can't say they were written badly or they weren't that interesting because every story in this collection was interesting. It's just a matter of taste and subject matter. But there were over thirty great stories here and I think I'm in love. I think I'm gonna check out every single one of these collections that Neil Clarke puts together. If this is going to be a representative sample, I'm going to be in dog heaven. :)


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Unhinged by Logan Keys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What happens when we let down our nice hair and pull out our Horror obsessions, yo?

Hell, just let out your fascination for anti-heroes and a few plainly deluded villains play out and accept their carefully constructed reasons. It's okay. Enjoy this trip down the insane lane.

Some of these stories are just plain-jane serial murderers while a few are truly passionate, but my favorites are definitely "Static Obsession" and "Paid in Full", mostly because such things hit me close to home with my daughter in the latter and the plain creep-factor in the former. :)

Still, there's nothing bad to be said about a little bit of a demon in my life, either, or "Whistle" just knocking me out of my chair.

All I can say is Thank You, Logan, for indulging us poor readers with our crazy appetites. :)



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