Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals

The first person I ever emailed was Terry Pratchett (which subsequently meant that the first email I ever received was from Terry Pratchett). This was back in the dark pre-web internet days when most people didn’t know what a Terry Pratchett was, his email address was reasonably public and you’d get a long detailed answer to any questions you had within a couple of hours depending on the time zone. Over the next decade I got to do cool stuff like go to dinners in small Lygon St restaurants with Terry Pratchett. Then Terry Pratchett became kinda famous and lots and lots of fans in Melbourne wanted to have small group dinners with him which sort of meant that no one could do that anymore.

I miss that Internet.

Anyway – Terry was recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. One of the effects of this was that it seriously degraded his ability to type. Unseen Academicals, the latest Discworld Novel, was mostly typed by Terry’s assistant Rob rather than by Terry himself with Terry dictating.

This is sort of evident at the start of the book where the prose doesn’t entirely taste like Pratchett. What I mean by that is that some authors, especially really good ones that you’ve been reading for a couple of decades, have a way of putting together words that transcends just style, but are identifiable in less easily describable ways. The closest that I can get is to say that Pratchett’s writing has a certain texture, taste, smell and color that I’m very familiar with. So while the Pratchett of Strata/Dark Side of the Sun/Color of Magic is quite a different writer to the Pratchett of Small Gods and Nation, there is a continuity of texture, taste, smell and color to the works that belie their common authorship.

This change in the way that the book was created means that the very start of Unseen Academicals reads a little like someone doing an imitation of Pratchett while getting it subtly wrong in hard to identify ways.

Adjust he does though – and within about 50 pages the familiar color, taste, texture and smell are back. That or I’d made the adjustment to the new prose. Unseen Academicals isn’t as deftly written as some of the more recent Discworld novels.

Where Academicals shines is the relationship between Ridcully and Vetinari. These two haven’t really gone toe to toe before and their scenes together are worth the price of admission.
The minor characters enjoy some echoes of what we’ve seen before. Glenda has a touch of the Agnes Nitt about her and she most likely would have ended up a witch if she’d grown up in Lancre rather than suburban Ankh-Morpork. There are similar echoes back to the golem Dorfl and Lobsang Ludd from Thief of Time in the character Nutt. There are many strong Pratchettian themes throughout Unseen Academicals. Pratchett is also more willing than in previous novels to allow a large number of previously significant characters like Vimes, Rincewind, The Luggage and The Librarian to have background non-speaking roles.

I was a bit concerned that there was an element of “the cast taking a bow” in this book given Pratchett’s ongoing medical condition as there were few favourites that didn’t turn up (though I guess Carrot, Nobby and Colon weren’t directly in any “shots” though Nobby sort of was). If Granny Weatherwax had turned up there would have been no doubt that this was what was going on.

Unseen Academicals is tangentially about Soccer. I like all the Discworld Novels. I don’t like this one as much as I like Small Gods but like it more than I like Soul Music and Maskerade.

Gridlinked: The Culture, with Altered Carbon

Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac books are what you would get if you mixed Iain Banks Culture novels with Richard K Morgan’s Takashi Kovacs books. The Polity is a Human empire that is run by a series of AIs (they even have really big ships and AI drones). The polity novels I’ve read so far deal with the border (line of polity) between those that are part of the enlightened culture and human settlements on the outside (separatists). So a bit like Special Circumstances in the Banks books. The central character is Agent Ian Cormac, a hard hitting Earth Central Security agent who was for a long time wired into the AI grid (gridlinked) and has lost a bit of his humanity because of it.

I’m in the process of reading the series, having been impressed by the starting novel (I’m reading Line of Polity right now which I’ll review in due course). The violence isn’t as full on as in Richard Morgan’s books, but the main character doesn’t mind busting heads. The universe is reasonably hard SF, which you kinda expect now days with the crop of UK/Irish Sci-Fi writers that seem to be pumping out the best stuff. I won’t go into the plot as it is a little convoluted, but if you’ve found the Culture novels a little dry (though liked the background and idea) you’ll probably get a kick out of Gridlinked. The second novel makes a lot of references back to the first, so it is definitely a series rather than stand alone books with the same characters set in the same universe. There are currently five books in the Agent Cormac series and a couple of others that are set in the “Polity Universe”. I haven’t started on those, but I’ll get to them after I finish what has been published of the Agent Cormac sequence.

Signal to Noise: First Contact with a Twist

Signal to Noise is a satirical hard science first contact story. The short of it is that a paranoid hacker genius comes up with a decryption algorithm that when applied to what was thought to be background noise from space actually finds communication traffic. Rather than share this revelation with the world, he sets up his own company and starts trading with aliens for advanced technology. He starts making lots of money. That is when the sharks (both human and alien) start coming out of the woodwork with hostile take over bids and blackmail threats. The moral of the story is that when aliens you meet on the intergalactic internet offer you some really nifty tech in exchange for some “cultural works” like Beatles recordings and Shakespeare, there is probably going to be a big hidden catch.

The style is free flowing. The paranoia is fun rather than oppressive. The protagonist is clearly *way* out of his depth and it is good to see a novel where the human doesn’t get to pull the wool over the eyes of the aliens by coming up with some clever leap of logic. Like I said in a recent Blunty thread – we better hope we don’t run into aliens that are smarter than us. As this novel shows, taking advantage of civilizations that aren’t as clever of yours is like taking candy from a baby.

I haven’t been able to source a copy of the sequel, A Signal Shattered, but would love to read it after enjoying Signal to Noise.

Peter F Hamilton Back Catalog

I finally got around to reading a bunch of Peter F Hamilton books that I hadn’t read. I purchased Reality Dysfunction when it came out and have everything in the series (including the handbook and Second Chance at Eden) and also have the TPB of Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained as well as hardbacks of the two released Void books, but hadn’t read any other Hamilton. Partly this was because a work colleague back in 2001 said that the other stuff was a bit rubbish. Anyway, after one of the Cheeseburgers suggested that some of the Hamilton back catalog wasn’t rubbish, I took my Christmas/Birthday gift card and got everything that I didn’t already own.

Of the set, Fallen Dragon reaches the same standard as the Confederation and Commonwealth sagas. I also like the fact that the book starts in a pub in Kuranda and there is a big arse spaceport in Cairns. The blurb on the back is a bit misleading as the main character has no idea what the fallen dragon is (or even that it is called that) until the very end of the book (whereas the blurb makes it sound like he’s heard some legend about a fallen dragon and wants to go look). The book is set a couple of hundred years from now in a galaxy where about 150 planets or so have been settled by starship. Colonization was a corporate rather than government driven affair and turns out to bring no money whatsoever back to Earth, so has pretty much stopped by the time the book starts. Some corporations “buy the debts” of colony companies and essentially go on “asset realization” missions (which are essentially piracy) to the colonies to legally pilfer whatever they can. The main story takes place on a planet that for some reason appears to have a very effective resistance movement. The major character is with the pirates and Hamilton is pretty clever in writing a sympathetic hero who is clearly working for some pretty nasty people. This is a stand alone novel and worth picking up if you haven’t read it.

The Nano-Flower is the next best of the set above, though comes in as the third part of the Greg Mandel trilogy. Mandel is a psionic detective. He has been surgically modified with a “psi” sense that makes him an empath. He also has a bit of precognition. He was in the mindstar brigade, which is basically a bunch of hard hitting military dudes that also have psychic powers – so no soft “Deanna Troi” type empathy here. Each Mandel book stands on its own with only minor references to the previous ones so you could read this one by itself. All books in the trilogy are set in a near future post global warming England which has just thrown off a decade of totalitarian socialist government. Mindstar Rising and A Quantum Murder are reasonably good, though not as un-put-downable as Nano-Flower. The only drawback with Mandel is that he isn’t as well written a character as some of Hamilton’s later ones (which makes sense, the Mandel books are his first three). There are definite hints of future characters (Julia, leader of a hypernational is clearly the template for Ione Saldana in the Confederation books, down to being a really powerful just turned adult teenage girl given the reigns of a powerful organization)

The one I wouldn’t recommend is Misspent Youth. Even though it sets up the Commonwealth Universe in terms of rejuvination, this book never really seems to come together all that well. The story revolves around the first person to undergo rejuvination therapy, being altered from having a body in his 70’s to having a body appear in its mid-20’s. The major problem for me was that none of the characters seemed to jell well. The son was perhaps the most understandable, but the main protagonist’s journey was all over the place – mostly into the beds of a whole lot of women who for some reason couldn’t stop jumping him. The plot can be summed up as “old dude gets to be young again and mysteriously turns into Casanova”.  The end is hinted at obliquely throughout the book, but feels more like a non-sequitur. The “what happens after he turns into casanova” isn’t really handled all that well and I put down the book thinking “meh”. Hamilton usually writes a lot of action into his books and this one didn’t have much (unless you count the bonking). So avoid this one unless you are a Hamilton completist.

Evolution’s Shore: Still good, but McDonald before his prime

Evolution’s Shore is a different kind of alien invasion story. First of all, most of the story takes place in the urban areas of Kenya and around Mt Kilimanjaro (which is in Tanzania). When I decided on the title of this post, I chose “before his prime” because one of the things that I really like about McDonald’s later work is how immersive it is when it comes to describing a foreign place. This book was written well before Brasyl and River of Gods and at this point (early 1990’s) it seems that McDonald’s “full immersion literary style” hasn’t hit it’s stride. There are certainly hints of it, but because the reader travels through the book looking through the eyes of a young Irish female journalist, they don’t really get the feeling of living on the streets in urban Kenya (the way they get the feeling of living in a future Brazil or India in the other books). The alien invasion takes the form of an infestation called the “Chaga”, a hyper-evolved semi-sentient super-organism that seems to be able to treat DNA like software code, rewriting it as it wants to such a level of sophistication that it can grow working biological replacements for electronic components once it has absorbed an original sample. The infestation’s borders are growing at around 50 feet per day and no matter what is tried, that tide cannot be stopped (there are also similar infestations in Malaysia, Central America and an underwater site in the Indian Ocean). This isn’t a “gung ho kick alien arse” kind of book – but can be thought of as an alien invasion book where the aliens are so alien as to be incomprehensible to us.

The Quiet War: Epic Hard SF

Alastair Reynolds recommended The Quiet War on his Blog. I love Alastair Reynold’s books (especially the Revelation Space universe) so I thought I’d pick up a copy. It was a bit of a gear change going from the deeply immersive work of Ian McDonald to the drier hard SF of Paul McAuley. The Quiet War is a cold-war type novel set 300 years from now. Due to ecological catastrophe in the 21st century, humanity sort of split – with the groups that had already colonized Mars, the Moon and near earth orbit (mostly today’s Western nations) being driven further out into the solar system by the more radicalized new powers. These include Greater Brazil (who now govern most of North and South America through a feudal oligarchy). The radicalized new powers basically haven’t forgiven the old powers for messing up Earth with oil and resource wars in the 21st century and the outer colonies are about all that’s left of that way of life. There are interesting hints of an earlier war (Mars dropping a small asteroid on China, Earth exterminating the first Martian colonies with a series of comet strikes) and hints at what occurred during the global catastrophe (large battles across the warming antarctic continent for dwindling fossil fuel resources) – but these tidbits are a background to the main story in The Quiet War.

The main thing that comes across in the book is that all the main characters are pretty flawed. Just as you think that you are going to like a particular character they do something you don’t really like. It is a lot like BattleStar Galactica where everyone is looking out for themselves and it is hard to take sides. Which hints at the novel’s complexity. A lot of authors paint one side as good and the other as bad (some even set up a flip to occur so that you suddenly realize that your assumptions were wrong), but few let you make up your own mind. The war happens and one side wins, but you come away from the book thinking that the side that won probably wasn’t the “good guys”.

I wasn’t roped into the book like I am with McDonald’s “un-put-downable” stuff, but I did find myself coming back to it, which is why I recommend picking this one up in paperback if you manage to see it somewhere (I got the TPB version).

Cyberabad Days – River of Gods short stories

It isn’t a secret that I think that Ian McDonald’s River of Gods is a brilliant book. Imagine walking through the streets of crowded India in the Blade Runner universe and you’ve started to understand the setting of River of Gods. As I’ve said earlier, the author doesn’t immerse you, he drowns you. It is hard to describe how fucking awesome this guy’s ability to paint a picture with words is (though if I could write like McDonald does, it might be possible to do so). The difference between this guy and other SF writers is the difference between watching Blade Runner on video cassette and then watching it in HD (and if you haven’t watched the remastered HD Blade Runner, do yourself a favor!). Both show a picture. One of those pictures is a lot clearer.

Cyberabad Days is a set of short stories/novellas (one of which won a Hugo) set in the India of River of Gods. Most of the stories are set around the same time (2047) as when River of Gods takes place, so these stories work almost as an addendum or companion piece to the original rather than as a sequel.  Sort of the way that the books Diamond Dogs/Turquiose Days or Galactic North sit within Alastair Reynold’s Revalation Space universe. Each of the stories leaves you wanting more. Each of the stories looks at the world of 2047 India through a different prism (the way that each of the character perspectives in River of Gods did).

Although this collection of short stories stands alone, you are better of having read River of Gods first. Given how awesome River of Gods is, that isn’t a particularly onerous requirement.

Six Directions of Space: Short and Sweet

Six Directions of Space is a limited edition novella written by Alastair Reynolds. There were 1000 copies printed (my signed copy is somewhere in the 400’s), though, like other Reynolds stories that appear in limited edition collections (such as Zima Blue) Six Directions of Space will probably turn up in a later Reynolds compilation (it also appears in the collection Galactic Empires (linked below) with stories by Peter F Hamilton, Ian McDonald and Neal Asher). This alt-history story primarily revolves around a space-faring Mongol culture that was not wiped out during the invasion of Japan in 1274. The empire has found a series of hyperspace conduits, called the Infrastructure, which allow it to build an empire spanning several thousand light years by the equivalent of our 23rd century. The infrastructure was built by a long since extinct race and is starting to decay. This decay causes the mystery that is central to Six Directions of Space which is that the Mongol Empire has charted most of the Milky Way and found no other active intelligent races, yet from time to time ships travelling through infrastructure conduits encounter starships that are both alien and familiar.

What I liked about this novella is the density of complex ideas covered in a very short amount of space. Reynolds manages to build an interesting universe and present an interesting mystery in a very short amount of time. Given that he has gone back to other universes that he’s created in this fashion (House of Suns evolved from a similar shorter fiction effort), I’d be enthusiastic about him returning to the one explored in Six Directions of Space.  

This story has also been reproduced in the collection Galactic Empires with other authors I love like Hamilton and McDonald – so you might prefer to get that collection as a way of picking up this story (if you can find it).

The Steel Remains: Hardcore Fantasy

If Richard K Morgan had written Lord of the Rings, Bilbo would have had a steamy one night sex fest with Galadrial, told Samwise to man the fuck up, and Gandalf would have made a whole lot of orc heads explode through the judicious application of magic fireballs. The saga would have ended with Bilbo gruesomely decapitating Golem, shoving the one ring into Golem’s eye socket, drop punting his head into the fires of Mount Doom while shouting “whose birthday is it now motherfucker?”

So you can kinda guess where Morgan goes with “The Steel Remains”.

Morgan’s writing has the attitude of that dude who revs the crap out of his V8 at 3am before depositing six inches or rubber on the road outside the front of your house. It isn’t fancy pants elves singing songs of the enchanted woods, it is fantasy of the sit down, shut up, strap in and hold on school of writing.

If you don’t like the liberal use of expletives, you are going to hate this book.

If you don’t like a bit of gore in the descriptions of your sword fights, you are going to hate this book.

If you only like laid back narrative arcs that move sedately along their own meandering paths, you are going to hate this book.

What may surprise some readers is that Morgan’s lead character is gay. Well that isn’t all that surprising, but what will surprise some and that Morgan doesn’t shy away from the explicit shenanigans detailed in his earlier books just because there are two dudes involved. He dances around it for a while and the other characters all get on with the business first, but it is still a bit unusual to see a mainstream novel be explicit about such things. Probably a little less unusual now that Morgan has knocked down that particular wall with all the subtlety of an asteroid impact. Morgan is throws a lot of stereotypes out the window and a big one he chucks is the idea that the biggest, baddest, coolest dude in the kingdom might prefer princesses to princes.

The Steel Remains is apparently the first in a trilogy, though enough gets wrapped up by the end of the book that it doesn’t feel as though you are left hanging. More a “okay, what is going to happen next” rather than “damn, I wish I didn’t feel as though I’d been hit by a great big “too be continued” at the end of the book. I enjoyed it and I think that we’ll see a lot more of this type of “gritty pedal-to-the-metal hardcore fantasy” in future.

House of Suns: Wait for the Paperback

House of Suns is the most recent book by Alastair Reynolds, best known for the Revalation Space books. Reynolds is a former physicist from CERN and for the most part the universes he creates prohibit faster than light travel. The universe that House of Suns is set in is the best part of the book. Humanity has colonized the galaxy and, through genetic maniupulation, separated into many wildly different sub-species such as those that are adapted to live on water planets who are part dolphin, those that live on planets with higher gravities who are more like elephants. One group of very long lived, if not immortal, clones travels the galaxy compiling a database on each civilization they encounter. It takes them about 200,000 years to make a circuit of the galaxy after which time they meet up and exchange data with each other. They use this information for trade purposes on each circuit, though generally any civilization that they have gathered data on during a circuit has fallen by the time any individuals from the line of clones return to that part of the galaxy. It seems that only groups that are constantly on the move around the galaxy don’t experience the inevitable fall of their civilization, though this could also be due to the time dialation effects of spending most of their extended lives travelling at near the speed of light. The main part of the novel involves an attack on the meeting that occurs once every 200,000 years. This attack wipes out all but a handful of the long lived soujourners and they spend most of the rest of the novel trying to figure out who in this galaxy of constantly rising and falling civilizations has the resources and ability to plan and execute such a long term strategy.

So the setup is great.

The execution of the novel can be a bit confusing, especially at the start as the author doesn’t clearly define which character currently has the point of view (they are all clones and the author swaps in and out). You pick up what is going on eventually, but it is a bit of a speed bump at the start of the book. The other problem, once shared by most novels that rely upon an elaborate conspiracy, is that when the conspiracy is unwound at the end, things fall a bit flat. The conspiracy is always more entertaining than the perpetrators of the conspiracy. The first three quarters of the book is great and the last a bit of a let down. The first three quarters make the book worth reading though and the let down isn’t staggering – its just that you go from reading a five star book to a three and a half star one near the end.

Reynolds “The Prefect” was one of my favourite reads of 2007. It is a stand alone book set in the Revalation Space universe and something that can be easily picked up by someone not willing to commit to a trilogy (or quadrilogy if you count Chasm City – even more if you count the short story collections) and a much better mystery. “The Prefect” was a tough act to follow (just as Anathem will be for Stephenson and River of Gods for McDonald), but would be my recommendation for those new to Reynold’s writing. The reason I haven’t reveiwed it more fully is that I’m trying to concentrate this blog on recently published books that people probably haven’t read, rather than stuff that has been around for a few years that they are more likely to have picked up.