Hi,

So I just finished Dark Space: The Sentients of Orion Book 1 by Marianne de Pierres. And that Book 1 is very significant. Absolutely no major question raised during the book gets answered. The book doesn't finish on a halfway reasonable stopping point. Just...arg.

So you've got Sole, this cosmic super-intelligence discovered by a starfaring prospector. The Orion League sets up shop near where Sole sits and sends the brightest minds to get their brains reconfigured by Sole in an attempt to understand what the hell it is and what kinds of high-tech goodies they can get from it.

Meanwhile, on a forgotten backwater planet, Mira is about to become First Pilot, the only person able to bond with the bioships that allow interstellar travel. She's also the first woman to carry the gene. This is troublesome on a planet like Araldis where gender discrimination is pretty heavily entrenched. Then she finds out that Trin, son of the ruler, is slated to become First Pilot. She goes on the lam, Araldis gets invaded, and the book works towards its cliffhanger ending.

There's nothing overall awful about the book. It's pretty well done and a lot of the high-tech is well handled with an organic bent. The plotting moves along, but it never really seems to get anywhere. I'm not super interested in picking up the next installment.

later
Tom

Hi,

In quick succession, I have also finished reading Mostly True by Bill Daniel. Mostly True is done in this faux magazine style and is dedicated to hobo graffiti.

It's...well, you've got to have an interest in hobos or graffiti or railroads or all of it to enjoy it.

Since I do, this was a fun read for me. It's loaded with photos and interviews and art. Most of it is drawn from the author's documentary film about hobo graffiti called Who is Bozo Texino? the Secret History of Hobo Graffiti. Bozo figures prominently in Mostly True as well and shows an interesting evolution. The original Texino (a rough sketch of a man wearing a large cowboy hat with a star on it and smoking a long-stemmed pipe) was originally done up by a railroad worker named J. H. McKinley. After marking boxcars with his trademark signature for many years, another young man was inspired and took up the marking, eventually altering it to a slimmed down form that could be drawn faster. According to the records he kept, this new artist (referred to only as "Grandpa" in the book) has put his version of the Bozo mark on both sides of some 350,000 cars.

The book also contains interviews with the artist of "Herbie" (a man in a sombrero sleeping beneath a tall tree) and the "Colossus of Roads" (another pipe smoking cowboy). Along with a smattering of other interviews and pieces. There's no coherent narrative thread, but it's more something to browse through. Again, of interest only if the subject matter really fires you up, but well worth it if you are.

later
Tom

Hi,

So last night I finished reading Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-Troy Casto. As an aside, a hyphenated first name? Dude, I'm sorry about your folks. You're a pretty good writer though.

So, yeah, in this book, Andrea Cort, investigator for Humanity's Diplomatic Corp has been sent to One One One -- a vast cylindrical habitat maintained by AIs. The habitat is different than most. Rather than having everyone live on the inner surface of the cylinder, people must cling to a dense plant life that grows out from the hub. The AIs have engineered a sentient species in the Uppergrowth which has started a diplomatic firestorm.

The AIs invited a team of humans out to observe the creatures and one of the team members has just perished in a suspicious accident. Given the restrictions placed on humans entering the habitat, only the AIs could've caused the death. But AI technology is vital to the well-being of every other civilization in the galaxy. If the AI's reputation as a neutral party is compromised, the results will be catastrophic. So Andrea is sent to One One One to solve the mystery...by finding a scapegoat among the human researchers and pinning it all on them.

So it's mostly a murder mystery set in space, but it does do a better job at grappling with advanced AI in a sci-fi setting than a lot of other books I've read. The mystery is well-done and I wasn't entirely sure who the culprit was until the end, so full marks for that. Additionally, the solution didn't really depend on technobabble, but it did make full use of the exotic environment and implications of the technology on display -- none of it was pure window dressing.

So a fun read.

later
Tom

Hi,

So when you're desperate for reading material...you're desperate for reading material.

And in the company's "lending library" there was a bunch of later-series Honor Harrington books and the first couple of Posleen War books by John Ringo. I thought Honor was ok and didn't feel like skipping to a later part of the series. So I went with Hymn Before Battle.

Um...cripes.

So aliens show up to offer us advanced tech in exchange for having us wipe out the Posleen. All the other sentient beings in the galaxy are genetically pacifistic except for the Posleen who are, literally, eating the rest of them for lunch. So humans get to jump into the fray. If they don't, well, Earth is third in line on the conquest front and a few billion Posleen are on the way.

Advanced tech means power suits and hand-to-hand combat. Well, ok, they've got rifles and stuff so there's a fair amount of shooting. The Posleen are mostly drones with a few God-Kings leading them. No starship combat (even though a few kinetic strikes from orbit would certainly put a dent in the hordes of ravenous Posleen). A fair amount of sci-fi name-dropping. Geeky IT nerd with a killer physique saves the day. It's also weird how there's a complete techno-fetish married to this gutsy warrior spirit thing going on.

I can't really recommend it. It's not...awful by my standards of awful. You just have to be really really into the genre to enjoy it. Most people won't.

later
Tom

Hi,

So I just zipped through Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. As you might guess from the title, it's about a woman (known only in the book as "Boss") who likes to explore derelict starships drifting in space.

Sadly, she does not encounter any Genestealers.

The book draws heavily on underwater exploration, archeology and wreck diving for its imagery and it translates surprisingly well. I'm surprised that in a world with FTL spacesuits aren't more tear-resistant, but it's another danger to working in a forgotten disaster that really helps the book go. Boss is in the game for the adventure and the history and her challenges mostly involve the wrecks she's working with and her dad who is obsessed with an abandoned space station and its mysterious "Room of Lost Souls".

The pacing is very good and if there's some oddness in the way some of the technology is handled, it's a minor disturbance at the edge. The book pretty much ends well, but clearly is keeping its options open for future books. It also handily passes the Bechdel test -- most of the major speaking parts go to women and their discussions are always about important matters at hand. I don't think there was anything super "wow" about it (although I do like the wreck-diving angle a lot), but it certainly makes for some nice bedtime reading.

later
Tom

Hi,

So I was really jazzed to pick up The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington. I mean, just look at that cover (go on, I'll wait). I want a print of that cover. And the basic blurb also seemed really great. Two grave-robbing brothers set out on a journey to avoid punishment for their heinous crimes and to loot the tombs of Egypt. Seemed like a black comedy kind of deal. Some Dying Earth mixed with Warhammer fantasy kind of deal.

Yeah, not so much.

So, in the very first chapter, the protagonists basically murder a family in cold (but creative) blood and then flee. Obviously, you're not going to be rooting for these guys and you expect some sort of grandiose comeuppance. Their behavior will get worse and worse and then they'll get hoist by their own petard and hey presto -- catharsis! The brothers are thoroughly selfish bastards who see themselves as being the agents of the Virgin Mary and sometimes their self-justifications for their terrible behavior is kinda funny. But mostly they're just bastards and the people they don't kill, they usually drag along with them until they meet an even worse end later on. The fact that the brothers occasionally kill demons, witches, or other monsters isn't terribly redeeming since it's not clear that such evils are really any different to them from the other people they come across and kill.

In the end, yeah, they get their ironic comeuppance. But it's like two paragraphs at the end of the book (in an ending that's terribly rushed and slightly incoherent). It certainly isn't much of a payoff for wading through their bluster for so long.

Get a print of the cover, that's probably for the best.
Tom

Hi,

I read Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson.

Here's my short synopsis:

"Hey, you know what's awesome? Capitalistic greed! You know what sucks? Altruism."

It's really a set of Shelock Holmes-like mysteries in logic and deduction. Only Sherlock Holmes is really really into Ayn Rand. Which is too bad because the puzzles are actually kind of fun, but all the time it's "only by ruthlessly persuing our own self-interest do we prosper as a whole!". I'm vaguely curious as to whether Mr. Anderson was pulling a Steven Colbert style parody, but apparently he was big into it.

So...not real interested in continuing to find more stories about interstellar space merchant Nicholas van Rijn.

later
Tom

Hi,

So this weekend I finished up Madness of Flowers by Jay Lake. This is the sequel to Trial of Flowers...and it's been quite a wait for it too.

I've really liked Trial and I think it's a bit better than Madness, but Madness is still a pretty good book. It basically picks right up after the events of Trial. Lord Mayor Imagio has saved the city from the gods of its past but now has to deal with snotty aristocrats. Bijaz the Dwarf is dealing with his newfound divinity while his estrwhile adversary Onesiphorous is down south hoping to keep the city of Port Defiance open. Into all of this, a mysterious woman and her giant ice bear arrive with tales of a lost Emperor's tomb -- threatening to stir up everything that they've all worked so hard to subdue in the last book.

The book keeps up a brisk pace and moves from viewpoint to viewpoint with deft ease. There was that strange sense of wonder and the fantastic that permeated the first book, but a bit less so -- perhaps because the characters become disperesed over the setting and you only see bits and pieces insted of the tight weave that wrapped Trial. That said, the writing is still top-notch and I was anxious to get to the next page. I'm hoping that he returns to this setting in the future.

later
Tom

Hi,

So a few weeks ago, shadesong was reading Desolation Road by Ian McDonald.

"Hey, I've seen that, it looks neat," I said.

"It's pretty good, I'll let you borrow it when I'm done," said shadesong

And she finished it and gave it to me and now I've read it.

It was sort of a unique experience...most books I read don't come with strands of shadesong's hair in them. :)

Beyond that, Desolation Road is the fever dream tale of a martian community's rise and fall. It's very much a Western in a lot of senses. Desolation Road is an oasis in a harsh, red desert that stands next to tracks where fusion powered trains rumble past. There's a boom town period and outlaws and bounty hunters and traveling circuses. But these elements never really overpower the central focus which is the lives of the people of Desolation Road.

The book is a series of short 1-2 page chapters. Each chapter works with a different person in the town (or person from the town as the years go by and he founders have children and grand-children). Because it's a chronicle of history, the chapters have a narrative flow to them, but it's choppy rather than continuous. This isn't as big a hurdle as it might seem. The overall thrust of the book, like Dhalgren is to use lyrical, poetic language and a shifting, unstable narrative to shift the reader into a more dreamlike state where everything has both more and less meaning than a straight reading of the text would imply. Just letting go and letting the chapters wash over you makes the book an enjoyable bit of escapism.

On that level it was a fun read. It's not something I'd want to make regular reading out of, but only because books like Desolation Road work best when they've got a lot of "regular" fiction to contrast against.

later
Tom

Hey,

Last night, buried beneath two cats, I hammered through to the end of Anathem by Neal Stevenson. mikecap has been at me to read this for awhile and it's gotten pretty good press.

And they're all pretty much right. This is a good book. At 900 pages it really needs to be and Stevenson keeps things moving right along.

Here's the basic skinny: On a world called Arbre, theoretical scientists have been consigned to monastical orders kept separate from the rest of society. This is done in part to prevent the distractions of the outer world from affecting their studies, but mostly because in the past the scientists have built things (devices to create artificial elements, advanced genetic engineering and so on) that are ill-understood and terrifying to the rest of the world.

So the scientists live in pretty low-tech style thinking their great thoughts. Their world is further broken up into subgroups that isolate themselves for a set period of time. The Unitarians are sequestered from society for a full year, Dectarians for 10, Centians for 100 and millennials for 1000. On a regular schedule however, the gates to their compounds open and the various groups are let out. Stories like this about sequestered groups of thinkers (The Name of the Rose, The Glass Bead Game) are kind of a sweet spot for me so I got sucked in pretty quickly.

The story opens when Erasmas, a young Dectarian, is let out of the monastery for the first time in 10 years. He wanders around a secular world very much like our own (and Stephenson takes any number of jabs at modern living). When he returns, he discovers that the monastery's observatory has been shut down to everyone. Other odd disruptions in day-to-day life start building up, culminating in the ouster of his mentor, Fraa Orolo. Pretty soon Erasmas himself is out in the wider world trying to piece together what's going on.

Much like Promethea is a primer on Hermetic magic disguised as a comic book, Anathem is a primer on higher-level/theoretical math/physics disguised as a science fiction novel. Given the quasi-religious nature of science, much of the book is filled with long dialogs where the characters investigate some scientific/mathematical/philosophical question. While this could become really tiresome, really fast, it's handled very well here. At the back of the book are some extended footnotes where some teaching moments in the story that get skipped over are explained in full. It'd have been fun to see a few more of them, which should indicate how good the writing is.

The book strays a bit from hard-SF into sci-fi woo-woo land a couple of times, but as the book progresses towards more and more theoretical, it's not too terrible. I will also say that the last quarter of the book involves a sneak attack so brilliant and original that I sort of don't want people to read this book so I can steal the idea for an RPG and have people think I'm awesome.

So yeah, Anathem is well worth the reading time and now that it's in paperback, your enjoyment-to-price ratio is going to be pretty high.

later
Tom

Hey,

So last night I finished up Accelerando by Charles Stross. I've never read much Stross, but lots of people seem to like him, so I thought I'd give it a whack.

Accelarndo is essentially an envisioning of the Coming Singularity as seen through the eyes of three generations of the Mancx family. We start with Manfred, an early 21st century idea man trying to obliterate money. After disputes with his wife, spiny lobster AIs, a French aerospace manager, the Russian Music Mafia and a identify mugger, we move on to his daughter Amber who runs away from home to Jupiter at age 12 to become Queen of her own personal kingdom. Finally, we catch up with Amber's son Sirhan who sits in a bubble dome floating in Saturn for the return of the last known copy of his mother.

The book was kinda hard to get into at first. Stross wants to invoke a sense of the future shock that all of his characters go through, but that makes for some rough reading in spots. He sorta catches it up as he goes along. But he does go head on into one of the thornier problems that is often unaddressed in near-Singularity books like this -- the future super-intelligences descended from ourselves and our creations are as completely unknowable to us as we are to a tapeworm, and there's no reason to think that these super-intelligences should have any more care, or treat us any better than we would a tapeworm. Which isn't to say that these AIs are particularly malicious or ill-disposed towards us, they just can't recognize their intellectual ancestors and could wreak untold havoc unintentionally. I think it's an important point that doesn't get addressed enough. It's sort of the flip side of Blindsight's meditation on non-sentient intelligence.

It was an interesting book, although I'm not super interested in picking up more Stross right away. I've heard good things about Halting State so maybe I'll give that a look-see sometime later.

later
Tom

Hey,

Although I finished it up a bit ago, I haven't reviewed The Drowning City by Amanda Downum. It was pretty good.

You've got Isyllt Iskaldur, a necromancer and spy from the country of Selafaian. She travels with her bodyguards/agents to the city of Symir in Sivahra. Sivahra is a subject state of the Empire of Assari. The Assari Emperor thinks it's time for Assari to once again try and invade Selafain. Since Symir provides a great deal of welth to fund the Assari coffers, Isyllt is here to ferment rebellion and throw things off course. In the process of attempting to set up a nice little revolution, Isyllt uncovers a deeper plot involving the emperor and discovers that the enemy of an enemy isn't always a friend.

The book has very solid pacing and good plotting. I thought I had a handle on the big reveal early on, but I was wrong, so I give that some points. Magic is a very real presence in the world where spirits are often stalking the living and magical charms/spells are the only relief. In particular, magic is shaped, stored and fueled by gemstones. Rubies contain fiery magic while diamonds imprison spirits and enslaves them to their owner. There's lots of small touches that quickly sketch out cultures without bringing in Bob Exposition.

The book purports to be part of a series, but neatly wraps up in the one volume so full marks for that. It's certainly worth a look if you're looking for some well-done fantasy.

later
Tom

Hi,

So last night I polished off Songs of the Dying Earth, a tribute anthology of stories set in the Jack Vance Dying Earth universe (home to Cugel the Clever, Rhialto the Magnificent and others. Some 23 short stories by a wide range of authors some very well known and others less so. We have stories that cover the darker Dying Earth style, the more comic style of Cugel and the baroque magic of Rhialto.

Anthologies are always a pretty dicey thing for me. It doesn't take too many bad or even mediocre stories before I decide that I've wasted my money. Further, the Dying Earth stories have a style that's easy to mimic but hard to do well. At 600+ pages of stories, I was a little nervous. I was happily surprised to find that pretty much every story is well done and a fair number of them go from good to great.

We have at least one story where Cugel is the protagonist and a couple involving Lianne and Chun the Unavoidable and Rhialto and Illdefonse make guest star appearances from time to time. Most stories simply use the setting to introduce their own characters and these are often the better stories in the collection.

If you're a fan of Vance, this collection of stories is worth looking into. If you haven't read Vance or his Dying Earth stuff, you should probably go pick that up instead and see what all the fuss is about.

later
Tom

Hi,

Over the weekend I finished off Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko. It's another one of those post-singularity novels so that might give you some inkling of whether or not you'd be interested.

The short form is that humanity achieved singularity in the Community...which then promptly transcended and left the Earth in chaos. Rising up out of the ashes are Pods, groups of humans who are bonded together via pheromones to think and work cooperatively and also apart. A few decades after the transcendence, Apollo Popadopulous, a pod of five young people are being groomed to command a starship that Earth will send into the Rift -- some sort of wormhole that appears to lead to other worlds.

The process of selecting the captain is a grueling one and Apllo is constantly being tested and compared to other pods who want the slot. The testing process is tough, but a series of mysterious accidents start making things a bit more deadly. Apollo must struggle to find out what's going on and how best to deal with the information he uncovers.

The book does a good job at presenting Apollo both as individuals (the first few chapters of the book focuses on each pod member's experiences) and then later as a composite whole. Humans aren't the only genetically modified creatures and there's a number of scenes where they interact with other uplifted creatures.

Overall, the book is a pretty good light read with some interesting ideas and viewpoints.

later
Tom

Hi,

So last night I tore through the novella The Lees of Laughter's End by Steven Erikson. This is another short story concerning those two black magicians, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach and their hapless manservant Emancipated Reese.

There have been a couple of previous novellas for these two and they all are vaguely set in the Malazan Empire universe of Mr. Erikson's main books (Gardens of the Moon, etc.), but these books are all stand-alone and although they take place in the same setting, they happen in fringe locales not referenced in the main series.

On this outing, the wizards and their servant find themselves driving across a vast reach of ocean known as the Wastes on a ship captained by an ex-soldier with a lot of secrets to hide and a cargo that's reacting poorly to Laughter's End -- a section of ocean polluted with the blood of the god of the sea.

Things quickly go from bad to worse, although here the wizards are less central to the story than are the poor sailors getting caught up in one nightmarish situation after another. I think this de-centralization is what's made this book the weakest of these for me. Normally Mr. Erikson employs multiple viewpoints to great effect, but he's also working with books that are 800-1200 pages long and has the room. Here, in short 120 page novella, the focus really needs to stay on the main characters or you can hardly say the book is about them.

The book is fun, but probably mostly of interest to people who've been keeping up with the main series.

later
Tom

Hi,

So I just finished up a couple of books. One is fantastic and the other wasn't.

Let's start with the fantastic first. If you like humorous fantasy, rush right out and pick up a copy of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard. This is a wonderful story that had me laughing out loud in several spots and reading the dialog aloud -- which is a pretty good indicator that I'm very entertained.

As you might guess from the title, Johannes Cabal is a necromancer. He sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the secrets of necromancy. His lack of soul causes freak phenomena which upsets his necromantic experimentation. Considering this unacceptable, Johannes travels to hell in order to get his soul back. Satan considers this brash request and finally agrees to a wager -- Johannes will be given a carnival and has one year in which to get 100 souls to sign up for damnation.

Although Johannes has considerable magical power and a keen scientific mind, he has absolutely no grasp of normal human interaction -- such as the reasons why anyone would ever go to a carnival. In order to make a go of it, Johannes enlists his brother Horst -- who is now a vampire thanks to Johannes. After a bit of recrimination, they get their hell ride under way.

The traveling carnival gives the author lots of room to showcase the different people who show up and how they are tempted (or not tempted) to sign their souls away. Satan and his minions are, of course, trying to stick in the boot as well. Johannes struggles to get his hundred souls and retain his composure.

Basically, if Adjo were a necromancer and lived in modern-day(ish) England, this is what his memoirs would be like. A lot of fun.

The second, far less successful book is called Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays edited by Eric Lane and Nina Shengold. These editors have a number of short play collections. Their first Take Ten: New 10-Minute Plays was great and I directed a couple of plays out of there for NWRep. So I had high hopes going into this one.

Most of the plays? Not funny. Maybe they just needed to be staged rather than read, but nothing really reached out and grabbed me. A lot of them just sort of meandered or were just odd for oddity's sake and some were flat-out sad. There were a couple of decent ones in there, but most of them really fell flat. Very disappointing.

But nothing for you to worry about because now you know to pick up the excellent Johannes Cabal.

later
Tom

Hi,

So in the past couple of weeks, I've gone through a pair of books describing two wildly different amazonian expeditions.

The first book True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. True Hallucinations is an account of Mr. McKenna's foray into the Amazon from the Columbian side back in the early 70's. The purpose for his trip was to study how the native peoples of the area tripped out. In particular, he was trying to find out more about something call oo-ko-he, but instead they wind up taking a hell of a lot of mushrooms. His brother gets very, very high and McKenna sort of shepherds his brother in the style of a shaman's assistant.

From this experience, Terence begins formulating his grand theories of time which eventually stabilizes around the idea that history as we know it will end in 2012.

The "science" such as it is, is pure crackpot fringe stuff. It is however, particularly fun crackpottery since in order to understand where he's coming from, you have to get a bit of a contact high off of his narrative and that's quite possible. It's a very clear picture of someone deep in the throes of a hallucinogenic trip and if it weren't for the fact that you can get conned into writing reams of complete nonsense, it otherwise seems like a pretty nice place.

About 60 years before Mr. McKenna and his hippie friends went chasing dragons in the jungle, Percy Fawcett was busy turning large blank spots on the map of South America into meticulously charted areas. A tall rangy man with Victorian sensibilities, he'd made dozens of trips deep into Brazil and Bolivia. Although he had no interest in magic mushrooms, he did have an appreciation and respect for the native inhabitants and began to suspect that there was perhaps a lost city deep in the jungle with wonders and riches. He called the place "Z" and The Lost City of Z: A tale of deadly obsession in the amazon by David Grann charts Fawcett's career, his mysterious disappearance, and the many people, including the author, who have set out to find him (and many of the rescue attempts themselves went missing).

The author ranges back and forth between the chronicle of Fawcett's life and modern day explorers who've searched for him. It works pretty well to illuminate the man and the people who've been inspired to go looking for him. There's also a fair amount of detail at how the amazon and its inhabitants have been mistreated and how that has (or in some case) hasn't changed through the years. It also describes the agonizing effort required to stay alive when exploring the jungle. The accounts of insects and parasites are particularly good at satisfying one's desire to travel deep into the jungle.

At any rate, two very different books about going on a trip into the jungle and the different kinds of magical places you might hope to get to.

later
Tom

Hey there,

So I brought three books on my trip back to Nebraska and zipped through two of them. On the way home I got started on the third and last night I finished it.

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding is a sort of fantasy steampunk-ish novel that is a lot of fun to breeze through. I mean, there's this substance called "aerium" that can be converted via electromagnetic process into an "ultralight" gas strong enough to lift metallic airframes, and there are "prothane" (and prothane accessory) engines to jet people around. There's not even a vague nod to plausibility. The book cheerfully states these things as facts and says "let's go on an Adventure!".

And that they do. You've got Darian Frey, the scruffy rogue and captain of the Ketty Jay. He's got a rag-tag crew of misfits and they slum along from one quasi-legal job to the next. Then he gets an offer to good to be true which, surprise, turns out to be too good to be true. Then they're on the run from everyone trying to figure out who framed them and how to get out of it.

At the risk of sounding dismissive, the book doesn't really have anything "new". There's no novel or grand Big Idea. The mystery doesn't really come with any huge surprises. The misfit characters all have a shady past and they learn to pull together in the face of adversity to become a real team, yadda-yadda-yadda. And yet, the book is a great deal of fun to read. There are a number of bits that made me laugh out loud and the pacing ticks along like a Swiss watch. Fully enjoyable light reading.

For people into steampunk or air pirates or who just want some escapist reading this is a great book to pick up.

later
Tom

Hi,

So on our trip back home to visit the family in Nebraska, our flights were...delayed. Which means I got a serious amount of reading done.

First up: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson. It was a pretty good piece of post-oil dystopian fiction.

Late in the 22nd Century, North America is largely controlled by the Dominion, a quasi-theocracy that exists at a 19th Century level of technology, partially by choice but mostly because of the ecological and technological collapse of the 21st Century. Existence is feudal in most areas with slavery once again in fashion. Adam Hazard is a young lease-man (not a slave, but part of the thin middle class) living in what was once northern Canada who strikes up a friendship with Julian Comstock, an aristo. Julian is the nephew of Deklan Comstock, the current President of the United States. Deklan killed Julian's father when he got too popular and has continued to hold tight to the reins of power. Julian has come out here with his mentor Sam Goodwin to keep out of the Presidential eye.

But Adam, Julian and Sam all get caught up in the Labrador war fighting the Dutch (really a collection of EU states that have been active in the now-open Northwest passage). Although they try and keep a low profile, Julian continually demonstrates bravery and daring and he becomes too popular for his uncle. Things escalate from there.

The book is a lot of fun to read. Almost all of the protagonists fall between the cracks somehow. Adam is torn between his Dominion upbringing and Julian's dangerous ideas on evolution and history. Julian is conflicted between quietly following his muse and exercising his considerable power to make changes. There are also (obviously) a lot of discussions about science vs. religion, the problems of power and how the past evolves to the present.

It's a fun book and certainly worth checking out. Especially if you're into steampunk-ish or dystopian-ish or post-collapse-ish or strangely optimistic books.

After that, I read through Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton. It's the first book in a projected series and I will say that the book ends a little awkwardly. It doesn't end on a cliffhanger per se, but everything is very much left open-ended and that's a shame. Otherwise the book is quite good. The city of Villjamur is the heart of the Jamur Empire which stretched out across a string of islands (it's implied that there are no large land masses of any kind). They're preparing for the "Freeze" a new ice age that's expected to last some 50 years.

Although humans are the majority, there are other humanoids in the Empire, long-lived rumel who serve in the Imperial Inquisition, and the bird-like garuda. The empire is also assisted by "cultists" -- experts who can operate the ancient technological relics.

To get things kicked off, the Emperor kills himself and Brynd, the commander of the Night Guard is sent to fetch his eldest daughter back to be the new Empress. Jeryd, an Inquisitor starts looking into the grotesque murders of some very high-placed senators. A man named Randar comes in from far-off Folke Island on a personal mission of his own. Dartun, a cultist, is desperately attempting to find a new way to become immortal.

Meanwhile, people are becoming more and more desperate to escape the coming Freeze, strange new monsters are cropping up, and sinister religions are creeping in with their own plots and schemes.

Mr. Newton jams the familiar with the fantastic in a way that's similar to Perdido Street Station, but there's a lot more actual plot going on (marred, as I said earlier by the "1st book in a series" problem). So it should appeal if you liked that. I'm sort of on the fence about getting the next one when it comes out, but I'll certainly keep an eye on it.

later
Tom