Below is a re-published old review of an even older book - Hospital Station, the first book in the extensive and entertaining Sector General series by James White. It’s a hospital, Captain, but not as we know it…
Meet Conway, the hero of these stories, a junior but highly qualified doctor, speciality exo-biology, working at Sector General Hospital. Or shall we say Sector General Hospital Station? Sector General is a huge, all-known-species (unknown ones always welcome) Hospital space station manned (ok, ok, staffed…) by doctors from all sentient species known. Conway has a way of attracting attention, so he finds himself frequently assigned to special or unusual cases. And not all of them are meant to be a treat…
Meet O’Mara, the Chief Staff Psychologist of Sector General. His job is to keep his staff sane (tricky, as a technical kind of schizophrenia by hosting alien personalities in one’s mind is a pre-requirement for the job), in line (tricky, with all these ETs around. They’re just not human, or at least not to our standard of what human means) and keep their heads from swelling up from thinking they’re the best (tricky. They are the best. But Conway is a specially tricky case there). O’Mara has a, ooh, reputation… most people would prefer not to be too near him and his sarcasm. Like, on the other side of the Galaxy, rather.
Meet the Monitors. They wear uniforms. They carry weapons. They are in charge of about anything. Including Sector General. And Conway doesn’t like this one iota. The monitors might see themselves as a friendly peace-keeping force. Conway sees them as Galaxy-wide oppressive force, hell-bent on destruction and killing. Cue some interesting exchanges and situations…
Meet Dr. Prilicla. He/She/It comes from a low-gravity planet, is vaguely insectoid, can walk on walls or ceilings, has a good number of legs/arms/manipulators, and is rather fragile. Oh, and Prilicla is an empath, meaning that it can reliably read the emotions of the beings around it, including the ones of its boss, Conway, who frequently says things that are not in synch with his true feelings…
Going Under is the 3rd installment in Justina Robson's Quantum Gravity Series (previous books are Keeping it Real and Selling Out), a series currently running to 4 books (not finished AFAIK), and definitely on the up and coming at this point.
And a word of warning – given that this book is part of a series this review will, by default, contain spoilers for the first two books. If that bothers you then go and read these first (worth doing so!), then come back.
The story of Going Under picks up shortly after where Selling Out left off – Lilah is in Demonia, is now married to both Teazle and Zal; and is making (er, slaughtering...) her way through the hundreds of duel challenges she has received. But she is unhappy, and a visit from Malachi, her fairy mentor from Incom (the Otopian National Security Agency, Intelligence and Reconnaissance Division) reinforces her wish to return and touch base. But saying her good-byes doesn't work, the solid effluent hits the air ventilation device, someone (sorry, that would be too much or a spoiler) gets killed whilst fighting a feral super-strong demon whilst searching for Teazle, and things really go down-hill from there.
I'd like to draw your attention to the Fall/Winter 2011 edition of Flurb, Rudy Rucker's Webzine of Astonishing Tales, which publishes short stories which are hard to place, both in topic as well as in terms of finding a publication.
I haven't read all the stories yet (I'm pacing myself, given that this is something which lends itself for reading on a mobile device when one is out of sensible reading material whilst on the move), but can comment on the following already:
Accelerando is a Hugo, A.C. Clarke and BSFA nominated novel by Charles Stross which I found to be an excellent read. A mesmerizing whirl of ideas. Stunning. Charles starts with classic Cyberpunk, and then takes the story and runs with it, accelerating all the time…
We find Manfred ‘Manni’ Mancx, a self proclaimed ‘born-again atheist’ in Amsterdam, on his usual mission to make someone rich with his ideas. All the people who profited from his ideas in turn fund his extraordinary jet-setting and money-free lifestyle. Pamela, his ex-fiancée, works as a headhunter for the more-or-less defunct IRS for the more-or-less defunct US government. He describes her as a born-again post-conservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the American century. Together (or, rather, when they’ve split up again) they have a daughter, Amber. Amber runs away from her mother as 13 year old (when her mother turns to a progressive Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionist religion), into slavery to a construct of companies which she, in turns, will own when she comes of age; her slave duties making her queen of the ‘Ring Imperium’ in Jovian orbit; from where she sends out an uploaded copy of herself on a starwhisp (a coke can sized chunk of computronium running a VR environment) to the nearest router in the intergalactic wormhole network. Still with me?
The story follows the Mancx dynasty over several generations, documenting the struggles between Manni and Pamela, Pamela and Amber, Amber and her son, and all permutations thereof; given that people can have several instances of themselves running in different environments, can ‘upload’ their personalities, and can ‘decant’ them back into ‘meatbodies’. All of this against the backdrop of humanity's spread from Earth into Cyberspace, Jupiter, the outer solar system, and beyond. One of the key measures in this development is the ‘singularities’, which changes in Mannie’s definition from the moment when the computational power of new computers produced matches the computational power of the brains of all newborn humans in the same period to the total coputer based vs Human computational mass and power.
The Agony Column on Bookotron.com has a short story by Neil Asher, titled Watchcrab, available to read online. The story deals with some happenings at Cybercorp (the Golem manufacturer we know from the Polity Universe) at their warehouse in Essex. It's fluff, it's fun, it's non-essential. Go read it.
No idea when this was posted (it's not dated), the story itself is from 2003; but I wanted to drop a link to it: click here to read the story.
The Gabble is a collection of short stories and novellas by Neal Asher, with all of the stories set in his Polity Universe with its various strands and series of books. At the end of the book there are Author’s Notes, providing some writing background and the publication history of each of stories, which vary quite a bit both in terms of when they were written, as well as when and where they fit into the Polity time line. As befits a collection of short stories I found that some of the offerings here had much more depth than others, that some were more ‘finished’ and polished, whilst others appeared to be mere sketches. Generally the quality of writing varies quite a bit throughout, although I didn’t spot any real turkeys (but also no interesting experiments, or must-read stand-out yarns).
So, given these are Asher stories, do we get the expected? I would say yes: Sex – there’s quite a bit of it, in several stories. Nothing that would count as ‘bad sex’ by my definition, but nothing very special either; and generally nothing story-relevant… Violence – quite some, although there’s not as much splatter and gore as some other Asher efforts proudly display, which is not all bad IMHO. There are some queasiness-inducing bits/scenes, though (Choudapt comes to mind), but again nothing I consider a problem, he stays way below Banks levels, as always.
So, here’s a quick round-up on the stories in the book:
Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck: Our favourite Masadan piece of wildlife (except for those amongst us who prefer Hooders, of course) makes its first appearance. We get big-game hunters, illegally going after a Gabbleduck which lives on a different planet for reasons not entirely clear – a world with an oh-so slightly alien and nasty fauna, which Asher presents with his usual panache. And I’d love to be able to pinpoint what the reference in the title is, but have failed so far. Answers on a postcard (or in the comments section below) please.
Going Under
Accelerando
