Category Archives: Science Fiction

Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

by Rebecca

Cryoburn
By Lois McMaster Bujold
2010

So I finally got around to reading Cryoburn, which is a ludicrous statement for me to have made. I adore Bujold. I discovered her about fifteen years ago and have read her books ever since. She has three different series, set in three wildly different universes, each of which I love. I have read everything she has ever published and loved them all. She was the first author for whom I actually started purchasing new-released hardcover books and even now is one of only four authors for whom I have done that. So why, then, did it take me nearly two years to read this book, checking it out from the library?

When it was first announced, I was super excited. A few months before it was finally due to be published, the publisher posted the first several chapters online as a teaser and I raced over to read them… and found myself kind of, well, bored.

First of all, this is the fifteenth book set in this universe and the eleventh book following the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan. And it is the first book in which there is no major character development.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Miles was introduced in The Warrior’s Apprentice (incidentally, that book (awesome-awesome-awesome) is available for free online, because both Bujold and Baen Publishers are very cool) as a high-born teenager in a military culture who failed to pass the military entrance exam due to physical disability despite all the nepotism in the world. He’s an awesome character: a brilliant, hyperactive dwarf with brittle bones, a lot of high-ranking family connections, and a deep desire to prove himself. It gets him into and then out of So Much Trouble.

But he does, slowly and painfully (and awesomely!), grow up. He grows into himself and faces set backs and failures and grows into himself again and changes who he is and what he wants and if the teenage years were hard, the twenties were driven, and the thirties were vicious, but now he’s settled. He’s happy with who he is and where he is and what he’s doing.

This makes me very happy for him.

But, well, there’s a reason most stories end with the whole “happy ever after” summary of the rest of characters’ lives. Happy settled people aren’t really as interesting as manic, driven people.

Now, character development isn’t the only thing that Bujold does fabulously well.  Her world-building is amazing and rich and deep. Her plot lines and mysteries are complex and tricky and hilarious. And Miles does remain an excellent character and driven in his investigations once they get going.

Cryoburn absolutely demonstrates Bujold’s skills at both science-fiction world-building and tricky plotting. The problem is that since the storyline is a mystery, and the reader only sees Miles’ discoveries as he’s making them, it takes a while for both Miles and the reader to get the momentum going.

Once it gets going, though, the book is excellent. I love the twisty plots and plans and characters and Miles’ manic investigation into them all.

It occurs to me that this book actually might work best as a stand-alone, without having read any of the previous books in the series, and thus coming to it without expectations.

The only thing that needs real background to get the full impact is the epilog, after all the plot ends have been tied up. The epilog, oh, the epilog: it hits like a punch to the sternum and makes my heart skip a beat. (You do need to have read the series to get the full impact, but oh, my heart, oh Miles, oh Bujold, love-love-love!)

So expect to slog a bit through the beginning, but the later two-thirds are really, really good.

What happened to conclusions?

by Rebecca

There are some traditional plot arcs out there that various authors use, re-use, re-interpret, or ignore entirely, depending on their choice. But there is one basic plot arc that I consider pretty universal: beginning, middle, end.

First there’s the beginning in which the writer starts the story and introduces the characters and the world and the problem at hand. Then there’s the middle in which stuff happens. Finally there’s the end in which the results are revealed for the stuff that happened in the beginning and the middle.

Is there some post-modern style now that considers endings to be passé? Because I have recently read two young adult books that I enjoyed right up until I realized that the last few pages weren’t actually going to involve any sort of conclusion.

There’s a difference between a book being the first in a series and just hacking a book into multiple pieces. Or so I had thought. But twice in a row, two otherwise well written books suddenly stopping like this. It feels like a conscious choice. It’s not a style that I approve of, but I’m beginning to really think it might be a stylistic thing rather than simply bad writing, especially since, aside from the lack of any conclusion, they were good books, or at least two-thirds of good books.

Hollowland
By Amanda Hocking
2010
(Free kindle edition on Amazon)

Remy King is nineteen, the world has fallen apart in a zombie apocalypse and she is going to go across country to get to her brother if she has to walk to do it, beating off zombies all the way. She is kick-ass and awesome, acquires a few companions and loses a few companions (but luckily not the lion, because I never before realized that a proper kick-ass heroine needs a lion companion, but this book convinced me), and is generally determined. This was pretty much exactly what I was in the mood for during my own finals madness.

Except for the fact that this is book #1 of The Hollows series and the plot transitions smoothly into plot #2 before the book ends, leaving me going: Seriously? That’s where you decided to break off? Seriously?

Cinder
By Marissa Meyer
2012

Cinder is a mechanic with a stall at the local market bringing in the only income her family sees. She’s also a sixteen-year-old cyborg in a world that considers cyborgs to be less than human. Her step-mother was not happy that Cinder’s adopted father had decided to adopt a cyborg and even less happy that he then proceeded to die of the plague just a few months later.

A lot of people are dying of the plague these days. Including the Emperor.

Which leaves the prince and heir to the throne in the rather unhappy position of being pressured to marry the queen of the independent moon colony. The lunar people have mind control powers and their royalty tend to use assassination and mutilation to get what they want.

This is the kind of crazy re-imaging of the Cinderella fairy-tale that I just can’t resist. It was excellent and crazy and fun… right up until the final climactic scene turned out to be less climactic and more of an introduction to a whole new plot arc with no conclusion in sight. Apparently there are four more books in the works.

So, what’s up with this?

Neither ending is really a cliff-hanger, per se. They’re just incomplete stories. For anyone who reads amateur fiction published online, it feels like I just came to the end of the posted portion of a WIP (Work in Progress). I had rather thought that the benefit of reading formally published books is that none of them are WIPs. It’s depressing to discover that’s not the case.

So, I ask again, is this really a style of writing that’s going around now: plot arcs composed of beginnings and middles, but no ends?

Please don’t talk to me, middle seat person. I’m reading.

by Kinsey

I spent the last two weeks traveling on business, which meant that I was too exhausted at the end of the day to put two words together for a post, but I got LOTS of reading done in airports, on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and lobbies. While I will spare you descriptions of the many in-flight magazines and celebrity tabloids I read during the enforced no-electronics portions of my flights, here are quick summaries of the books that kept me sane as I criss-crossed the country:

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides
This was fine, I guess? I was interested in all the characters and I wanted to find out what happened, so it was compelling reading. On the other hand, it was really long and nothing much actually happened and there was almost no resolution of any sort and just because I was interested in the characters didn’t mean I liked them. In fact, pretty much everyone in the book was extremely unpleasant or shallow, so it was a bit like watching a very long, slow train wreck as these characters messed up their lives over and over. I had initially written here that I wanted to warn people about an unflattering portrayal of a character with a mental illness, but all of the characters were portrayed in unflattering ways so the manic depressive actually came out pretty well, comparatively speaking. I loved The Virgin Suicides, so Eugenides has credit in the bank with me, but while The Virgin Suicides felt airy and impressionistic, this dense, heavy, weighty novel feels like it was written by someone else entirely. English majors might like it though, since it seems to feature a lot of inside jokes about literary criticism.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Remember how back in the 1970s a French guy strung a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers and walked back and forth between the buildings, a hundred floors up with no safety net? This novel describes what was happening in the lives of a number of New York residents on that day, and how they were all connected to the wire walker and to each other. Although it does feature the walker (in real life, his name was Philippe Petit and you can watch an amazing documentary about his walk called Man on Wire), the story isn’t really about him at all. It’s really about New York, and America, in the 1970s–Vietnam, crime in the cities, race, immigration, and how all these things play out in the life a few individuals. As a general rule, I don’t like books that follow multiple characters connected only by the thinnest of threads. However, in this book each character is beautiful and heart-breaking and I found that they all looped together in really satisfying ways. Sad, but lovely.

The Thrift Book by India Knight
I think I’ve explained here before that I want India Knight to be my best friend, so I adored this book, even though it is basically just a list of fairly obvious ways to save money. You know, cook at home, make Christmas presents, grow your own herbs, don’t be fooled by fancy skin creams. Knight puts a fun spin on it by focusing not on getting out of debt or being as cheap as possible, but by talking about all the ways her strategies make you feel (to sound English about it) posher and more glamorous by not trying to hard or getting caught up spending on foolish thing. Plus, she’s funny. At one point she refers to playing Scrabble online as her “ongoing Alzheimer’s prevention project,” which is exactly how I think of Words with Friends. However, if you are not trying to befriend or become India Knight, it’s probably not necessary to read this.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Really fun, and absolutely perfect airplane reading. A sci-fi story that manages to be both a puzzle/treasure hunt and a celebration of 80s pop culture. I think is truly aimed at folks a few years older than I am who spent much more time in video arcades, but I loved it and was so absorbed I was able to read it in even the loudest terminals and restaurants.

The Martian Chronicles

by Anna

Whew, barely made it for Banned Books Week! I did not care for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and this is a  lengthy review of me thrashing around for a reason.

The Martian Chronicles was published over 60 years ago, in 1950, and it reads like it. Ray Bradbury imagined amazing technology, but the social norms feel very grounded in mid 20th century to the point where I struggled to even understand, let alone empathize, with any of the characters. Every female character is either resignedly submissive to an overbearing husband or an innocent child even in adulthood (or sometimes both—I’m looking at you, Ylla).

Photo: The Martian Chronicles Book CoverThere is greater variety in the male characters, but they too seem outdated. They all feel like characters from old TV shows, either the stern but kind father figure, the intelligent and care-worn authority figure, or the brutish and ignorant everyman.

The technology is an extension of what was cutting edge in the 1950s—robotic houses and people and rockets. Which, of course, we still don’t have today, but that isn’t the direction technology went. There is no way Bradbury could have anticipated the microchip and then the Internet, but those inventions changed how our entire society thinks about technology. To way oversimplify, we’ve gone smaller, not bigger, and into intangible information-sharing realms, not large metal structures. So, it reads a bit like looking down a path we didn’t take as a society, but less interesting.

And then, even more pervasive but harder to describe, there is the overall messages of the book. The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and the Cold War was brewing. People were starting to think about and be terrified by the power of destruction we as a society held. Sadly, at this point, this is all pretty old hat. Sure, we all have the power to blow each other up; it probably won’t happen, but if it does, well, that’s life, right? I think previous all-consuming fear has turned into mild concern but mostly apathy for today’s population, and that early panic feels melodramatic and a bit naïve.

As with Lord of the Flies, I wondered how I would have felt about this book if I’d read it in high school 20 years ago. The book starts in the year 1999, and concentrates mostly in the early 2000s, so it would have still been set in the (very near) future. 20 years ago, our space program was still thriving, and our idea of the cutting edge of technology was still concerned with the idea of androids instead of nanorobotics.

I was commenting to a friend how disjointed the book reads, and he told me that it was a compilation of short stories that Ray Bradbury had previously published individually in magazines. That helped me understand the structure of the book somewhat better, but it made me wonder if perhaps Bradbury had shoehorned short stories into a Mars setting that had previously nothing to do with Mars?

My favorite section, the recreation of Poe’s House of Usher as an automated haunted house, had very little to do with colonizing Mars, and was much more a Catch-22-like commentary on out-of-control bureaucracy. Maybe I liked that part so much because that’s one aspect of our society that hasn’t changed a bit.

I think that’s both the positive and the negative of The Martian Chronicles; it doesn’t read like one complete book, so it shifts in tone, characters and plot wildly. That means if you don’t like one section, there’s a good chance you’ll like another one.

(I should cut Bradbury some slack; this review is even more scattered than The Martian Chronicles! I will call it an homage.)