Missile Gap is a short story by Charles Stross, which is available both in Hardback and online. The book plays during the coldest phase of the Cold War (Cuba crisis), but on an earth far removed, in time as well as space, from what we know. And the 10 million Dollar question is, as always – does humanity have a future? Answers on a post card – if you can find a post office, 100 million light years from home …
Film clip: An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.
Cut to: A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.
Here's an old, and previously published (on the now-defunct Diversebooks site) review of Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson - this is the fist half of the final book in the original Dune cycle, written to the original outline Frank Herbert planned for the book.
There are a lot of new books available in the Dune universe, most of them written by Brian Herbert (Frank Herbert’s son) and Kevin J Anderson – both acclaimed authors in their own right, now working on expanding and filling in the gaps in Frank Herbert’s epic story. But this book is different. When Frank Herbert died, he had the outline, plot etc for the finale of his epic series ready – but it laid in a safe deposit box, forgotten, for over 10 years, before it was discovered again. So this is Frank’s original vision of how the story, which started, millions of years ago after the Butlerian Jihad, would come to closure. And boy did he have plans for his follow-up to ‘Chapterhouse Dune’ – there was enough material (so Brian and Kevin felt) for a two-volume finale...
The Hacker Crackdown is/was Bruce Sterling's first non-fiction book (he has written a 2nd one since, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years) – essentially this is the sound of a successful author putting his fiction/SF work to the side, and writing a piece of classical, well-researched journalism on the hacker/phreak/cracker 'digital underground' of 1989/90; a crackdown which affected figures in his circle of acquaintances (not even for legal reasons, but for overreach and general hamfistedness of the agencies involved) and which he felt could just as well have caught him up in its sweep.
He portraits, in a very readable form, the beginning of computer crime, pre-Internet (ie with dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as main hub of these groups and communities!); with the Legion of Doom, Acid Phreak, and Phiber Optik (just to name a few handles which rang a bell from my time on the BBS scene… it's not that long ago, honestly!) and of Operation Sundevil and similar efforts by the law enforcement agencies. And it ends with the Well and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation – something which profoundly affected and shaped the discussion and development of privacy and legal arrangements on the nascent Internet, and continues to do so.
Unseen Academicals is the 32nd book inSir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I do belive that neither the author nor the series need introducing here, no? Here we go:
The Unseen Academicals is the Unseen University's football team. Yes, the setting here is Football. Or Foot-the-Ball, as the Wizards call it, referring to the old Gentleman's game, which has, in classic Ankh-Morpokh manner, deteriorated into something bordering on Anarchy, a back-alley brawl, with a mix of players and spectators (and plenty of violence), known as 'The Shove'. Ever heard of an ancient (and still played) British game called 'The Ba'? Look it up... In the Royal Art Museum an ancient vase has been found in the cellars, depicting an ancient game of Football, and the rules it was played by. You know the kind of vase – the players are all in the nude, our museums have plenty of those, too (not depicting football, that one has yet to be found). Ankh-Morpokh calls it 'The Tackle' – bad pun alert! The Wizards, meanwhile, have realized that, every so often (er, rarely), they need to participate in a game of Football, sorry, Foot-the-Ball, to retain a rather large legacy. And, just coincidentally, Vetinary, Tyrant of Ankh-Morpokh, asks Archcancellor Ridcully to modernize the game along the lines of the ancient rules. And so they get started, in their typical manner.
Light on the Sound is the first book in Somtow Sucharitkul's acclaimed 'Inquestor' Trilogy (which runs to 4 books. See Douglas Adams for another example of counting series...). The book is, like the entire story arc, epic in scope, poetic in execution and tone, and generally rather a standalone (and standout) amongst all the books I've read so far.
The story plays of on the world of Gallendys, where the boy Kelver lives in the shadow of the Skywall – actually one side of a crater 100k (klomets, in the book) high, and thousands wide. Inside it live, we learn, an ancient, pre-human race of flying beings called 'Delphinoids' by the Inquest who rules the human dispersal. Also inside the skywall exist tribes of engineered humans – deaf and blind, so they don't have to see and hear the lightsongs of the Delphinoids which they call Windbringer.
This book appears, at least at first, much simpler, more linear, and with a much smaller scope than the first book in the series (Shikasta, to give it its short name). It deals, on the surface, with humans, their relationships, and with the society that shapes these relationships and is in turn shaped by them instead of the history of the world from prehistoric times until WWIII, set in a galaxy-spanning setting, as the first book did. There are always little hints that this is just a small part of something, that the larger setting is there, but just not focused on at the moment in the rush of emotions and conflicts.
The story setting is easily told – Al•Ith is the Queen of Zone 3, a self-centred, peaceful and egalitarian country, led by female 'Queens', with a society based on equality and communication. She is ordered, by the 'Providers' (large picture warning! Although they are never specified, explained, or described, we never see more than the actual characters see and know...) to marry the 'King' of Zone 4, Ben Ata. Zone 4 is everything Zone 3 is not – it appears, at least to Al•Ith, to be barbarian, despondent and poor, and solely based on hierarchy, war, and the army which every single male in the Zone belongs to. You can imagine that neither of these exponents of their respective Zones are happy with this arrangement (but rebellion against the Providers is unthinkable, it appears), so they are thrown together, thrown into a personal and collective crisis, and their Zones, of which they are but an expression, are shaken up together with theri prime exponents.