Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for a co-writing effort by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. Cobweb is their 2nd book as co-authors, after 'Interface'. The story is written to play in an alternative recent history, although it could just as well fit in with the facts as we know them from the 1st Gulf war, edited as they are when they reach us... It follows two separate strands in the build up to the war. On the one hand we have gutsy Betsy Vendeveter, a low grade analyst in the CIA, who has just stumbled over a connection that nobody else has noticed, and then committed career suicide by actually releasing it, which means she seriously overstepped her boundaries. Especially as her observation, concerning mid-Eastern graduate students, biological weapons, and associated skullduggery torpedoes all the careful work, done over many years, of James Gabor Millikan, US Diplomat to the Near East, and main shaper of US foreign policy in the area. So, from thereon she is shunned, shunted about, and only helped in the most obscure ways – the service wants, no, needs her insights, but cannot be seen to want her.
Ally is the 5th (and penultimate) book in Karen Traviss' excellent Wess'har Wars series, and thus the set-up for the much-anticipated final instalment.
It will be interesting to see how she ties up all the story strands and complications – this book shows how difficult it can be to actually line them all up to even allow for such an attempt. Her main challenge, I guess, is also what makes this series such a great read: with every book the story direction changes, as new levels of argument and complications are introduced. Every time you think you've got the ethical, moral, religious, and ecological arguments and positions the story plays in (and with) nailed down – along comes another instalment, and turns it all on its head again; both through more extreme examples, as well as through demonstration of compromise under constraint, and consequences this has. Whilst this makes for a challenge, as the books keep taking you out of some kind of comfort-"I-know-how-things-tick-here"-zone, it also makes this story arc very very enjoyable as she refuses to trot out the same old 'it sold well earlier' approach. Commendable.
SPOILER WARNING. The following will (well, should) not spoil your enjoyment of this book. But. If you haven't read the earlier books in the series, and are planning to do so (I can only recommend you give it a go, it's worth it) then this will seriously spoil your fun from discovering where things are heading, and all the changes Karen introduces to keep you and me entertained and on our toes. So, if you're planning to start at the beginning, stop reading NOW.
The Stone Canal is the 2nd book in the really rather brilliant Fall Revolution series by the Scottish written Ken MacLeod. This was his 2nd published novel overall (he has 13 novels to his name meanwhile – you see, I'm a bit behind with reading his stuff. My loss!).
This is the follow-up to his dazzling debut The Star Fraction, and, believe it or not, he upped the ante. Before I get going with the book itself a word of warning – this is a review for a book in a series, it will, by its very nature, contain spoilers for the earlier book. If you don't mind then read on, otherwise go & get the first book (The Star Fraction) and read this first. Actually, go and get the entire series (4 books - the other ones are The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road), full stop, it's worth it.
Frank Herbert wrote 5 instalments of his celebrated Dune series, only to leave the story arc unfinished at his untimely death in 1986. But a few years later his son, Brian Herbert, who had already written a series of Dune tie-ins with Kevin J. Anderson, found his outline of how he intended to finish the series with a final book in a safe deposit box.
This is what Brian and Kevin made from this material, or, to be precise, this is the 2nd half, as they turned it into two books instead (the first one was Hunters of Dune). Editing/cutting might have been the better option, in my opinion; there might have been material for one good book, but definitely not for two.
But, before I go any further a word of warning – this, by its very nature, contains spoilers for the 6 books (5 by Frank, one by Brian & Kevin) that went before in the series. If this bothers you then stop reading now.
A few words on Robert J Sawyer's Factoring Humanity, an Alien Messages (SETI?) and First Contact story which spins a good if slightly over-egged and unrealistic (even within SF parameters) yarn. It was nominated for the Hugo Award, but didn't win it.
We are not alone. To the contrary – for almost 10 years now humanity has been receiving alien messages from the direction of Alpha Centauri A, roughly every 31h. The first 11 were easily decoded (nothing terribly exciting in there), the other 2832 have resisted every attempt to make sense of them. The only constant is that the number of bits transferred is, for each message, the product of two prime numbers (and no, not always the same ones either), which suggests that these should be interpreted graphically. Heather Davis, of the University of Toronto, is the leading researcher on the topic (although no one knows much…), and an instant celebrity now that the transmissions have ceased to arrive. What do they mean? And why have they stopped? Are the aliens waiting for an answer before resuming?
Here's a review for Maelstrom, the 2nd book in the Rifters series by Peter Watts. I wrote this some time ago, and it's purely co-incidence that this reaches the top of the pile just as Peter has been convicted of 'obstructing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer' (sentencing has not happened yet, he's facing up to two years in prison). Get this book. No, get the series. It's top stuff, and he needs your support.
N'AmPac has nuked the Grid Authority's power generation station 'Beebe' on Channer Vent, Juan de la Furca Ridge, for reasons unknown. It must have been worth it – the subsequent Tsunami as well as the Earth Quake ('The Big One') from the slipping fault lines left the Coast in tatters. Or in the words of Patricia Rowan, the Corpse who ordered the nuking: "Millions dead. Trillions in damages. Preferable to the alternative, she knew. It didn't help much. Saving the world had come with a price tag attached." But the nuke didn't get everything it was supposed to. Lenie Clarke walks out of the Ocean after walking home 300 miles across the Ocean floor - onto the Oregon Strip, where the refugees are held, nominally until they move on, realistically in perpetuity. And everyone she touches, everywhere she goes, things change. Because Lenie carries something from the deep Ocean, a Nanobe ('?ehemoth') older than the proverbial Martian Mike, simpler than all life on Earth as we know it. And now it's free and on its way to world domination, at the cost of the current Biosphere. Whatever that one's worth…
"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the City of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea." What a way to start a story, to set a scene. Start with the action. You see, this is some kind of post post-apocalyptic world. It has moved on from the 60-minutes war, with its Orbit-to-Earth atomics and its Tailored-Virus strikes. 'Lost America' is still a wasteland, the only life the Archaeologists and Scavengers scouring it for pieces of 'Old Tech'. The rest of world had to react to the Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Glaciers that followed the war. Quirke was the first to put a town, London, onto Tracks, so it could move out of harm's way. Nearly everybody followed suit (with the exception of the Anti-Traction League in the East, behind a huge range of mountains) – with towns ranging on wheels, tracks, on runners in the ice wastes, drifting in the clouds, floating on the sea. And so a world of Municipal Darwinism, a town-eat-town world was created, and prospered for a 1000 years. But now prey is getting scarce, and the Mayor of London is forced to take his 7-tier town, with St Paul's Cathedral on top, back out into the Great Hunting Ground and its dangers, looking for towns to eat.
Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for a co-writing effort by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. Cobweb is their 2nd book as co-authors, after 'Interface'.
Ally
The Stone Canal
