The Silicon Man by Charles Platt is a very thorough treaty on the foibles of ‘Uploading’ people (in the vein of Charles Stross’ Accelerando or other books on a similar topic…), mixed with a good old detective story, and hacking as a socio-political act… Plus, it was published by Wired - how cool can you get? Ok, ok, yesterday’s cool ;-)
Jim Bayley, loving father and husband, works for the FBI. While he traces the source of some new, deadly weapon which doesn’t leave any trace (it simply erases all brain function) on the black market he stumbles upon an (apparently failed) research project called ‘LifeScan’ at North Industries, a Defence Contractor. LifeScan attempts to create Artificial Intelligence not by building/programming intelligence, but by scanning a brain, neuron by neuron, to be simulated and stimulated as part of the computer. The team feels (understandable) threatened by Bayley’s poking about, captures Bayley, and uses him as the first Guinea Pig to be uploaded into their MAPHIS (memory array and processor for human intelligence storage, thanks for asking) system. Successfully, it has to be said. The man behind the ever-going-on-needing-money-but-never-delivers-anything LifeScan programme is Leo Gottbaum, supposedly retired, a reactionary, and anti-government (all kinds thereof) TV head, and an early virus writer. And he has an agenda…
Following up the dystopian, cynical, and all-too-believable Moxyland and the award-winning - Urban Fantasy of Zoo CityLauren Beukes demonstrates her versatility as a writer by treating us to a tale of a time-travelling serial killer in The Shining Girls.
The story kicks of with a every so slightly creepy meeting between the 7-year old Kirby Mazrachi and Harper, who declares himself not to be a stranger (which means she is allowed to talk to him), and who gives her a plastic pony as a keepsake, with the promise that he'll be back for it.
The rest of the story is told in 3 main threads:
One thread follows Kirby, now in College, and trying to deal with the physical and mental scars of an attempted murder which she only survived by chance, and by the narrowest of margins. She ends up as an Intern, as part of her studies, at the Chicaco Sun-Times, working with Dan Velasquez, who now writes for the Sports part instead of Homicide after a close shave with a heart attack. She rigged it that way, as he is the one who covered her case, and she hopes he can help her with her mission to track down her attacker.
The Janus Effect was the debut novel by Alan Cash from the Birmingham SF Writers Group; at the time of review (this is a re-post) I considered it to be a “ok effort for a debut novel, with some strange changes in style and topic halfway through. Overall an enjoyable read and a promise for the future – we look forward to the next book Alan!”
The book plays in a dystopian near-future suffering from Global Warming, with the UK as an isolated Dictatorship, experimental time travel available to a select few, and Aliens on Earth (no contact so far). Plenty of standard SF clichés, then.
Liberty Moss (don’t call him by his first name, he hates it!), better known as Loratu, is being freed from captivity and the mind-read-technology experiments Dictator Berbek’s scientists performed on him, trying to uncover how he became a Terrorist. Moss, having lost 20 years of his life (or, rather, the memory thereof) due to these experiments, which led to a mind block. He can’t remember himself how he moved from being a loyal servant of the administration to become the leader of the ‘People of the Mist’, opposing Berbek’s regime. We’re looking at a UK which reminds us very much of what usually happens to England in a Ken McLeod novel: this is a dystopian near-future scenario, with the UK as an isolated Dictatorship, with the Thames barrier breached due to Global Warming, and with some quite advanced technology, which is only available to the inner circle of the leading classes, plus some rogue scientists (there’s always a few, no?).
When I first read (and linked to) Paul Cornell's Hugo-nominated short story The Copenhagen Interpretation I was not aware that this was the 3rd instalment in a series centred around Major Jonathan Hamilton, a secret agent/spy/soldier in a British Army and a world very much unlike our own, with it's own technology (there's a slight whiff of Steampunk here), which I find rather fascinating (I suggested to Paul that he turn the story into a book, without even realizing it was a series of short stories already!).
Anyway, without further ado, here are the stories:
This is an older review for Nine Layers of Sky, an SF story set in the former Soviet Union and permeated by Central Asian Myth by Liz Williams, which, despite of some gaps in the story and a ‘clunky’ ending, I was rather taken by.
Modern (aka Post-Soviet-Union) times, in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Elena Irinova, a former Astrophysicist on the Soviet Space Programme, is eking out a living by working as an office cleaner, dreaming of old space-faring glories in the past, and of a new live in Moscow, or Canada, in the future. When a strange, spherical, black object comes into her possession (by pure chance, it seems. Maybe.) her path crosses the one of Ilya Vladimirievitch Muryets, an 800 year old Bogatyr (Russian Hero. Son of the Sun. Down-and-out Heroin addict) who has a strange love/hate relationship with the fabled Rusalski (some kind of scary nature spirit, or that’s what children are told), who keep reviving/healing him, despite his desire to die. A lot of people seem to be after the strange object in Elena’s possession – Rusalski, shady officials with all-black eyes (called the Volkh by Ilya), other Bogatyr. They call the sphere a ‘coil’, a key, as it appears to open, in the right hands, a gate into a parallel world called ‘Byelovodye’, ‘the heart of all the Russias, the hidden Republic’ – shaped as much by dreams as by its inhabitants.
The cast is varied – we have our heroine, Elena, who is Soviet, and thus completely lost in the post-soviet and post-soviet-space-programme world: “I lost my job, my self-respect, and my family is starting to fall apart. Even my country’s been abolished”.
The Silicon Man 
When I first read (
