According to her this is "the pseudo-Asian SF story with bots, a dying colonial empire, and a prison orbiting a black hole–aka the one where I had to improvise four pseudo-Chinese poems before I could actually write any of the story’s scenes. " (her words, not mine), and she's been asking for feedback on this, either on Clarkesworld or on the World SF Blog.
The picture on the right is by the late Al Williamson, the winner of the 2010 Spectrum Grand Master Award.
I rather enjoyed this story, which plays in an alternative time line, with a slightly steam-punky Victoriana feeling (no, I wouldn't call it Steampunk, not really), where humanity has spread throughout the Solar System, material/space etc can be contained within and affected by 'folds', and the powers of the day have reached a precarious (and protected at great effort) 'Balance', which in turn has stopped all or most research and exporation (as this would be one-sided, and thus threaten the balance).
But then again, any story which mashes up Quantum Theory with a contrapunktion (see what I did there?) of Dr Duncan MacDougall's Weight of the Soul and the Dark Matter in the universe gets my vote, for sure!
Read it for yourself here - and if you enjoy it, why not vote for it at the BSFA Awards?
Here's my review of Thud!, the 30th (according to the blurb) instalment in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Thud! is a Watch novel, or, by current standards, a Commander Vimes novel. Now, some of those were great entertainment, whilst others were forced, both in genre/style as well as story wise. Take heart - this here is one of the good ones.
Sam Vines, Duke of Ankh-Morpok, Commander of the City Watch, has a problem. OK, he has more than one, but the Big One is that Koom Valley day is approaching fast. Koom Valley, where the Trolls ambushed the Dwarves. Or the Dwarves waylaid the Trolls. Depending who you ask, you see. I mean, who remembers, after all those hundreds of years? But there are trouble makers at work, stoking inter-species tensions, twisting old stories to their liking, and the tempers are flaring. There are deep-down dwarves in Ankh-Morpok, dwarves who always go shrouded, and who have never seen the light. There are tunnels, miles and miles of them, under the city. There are dead dwarves, first a grag (Dwarf spiritual leader), the chief troublemaker, apparently (obviously?) killed by Trolls. Then there are more, killed by other dwarves. There are rumours of a Troll king in town. And then there’s Brick, a city-born Troll, a gutter Troll, a lowest-rung-drug-peddling-always-out-of-whatevers-left-of-my-mind Troll; who has seen, but doesn’t know, can’t tell, and won’t be believed. Looks like Sam Vines will have a full-scale re-enactment of Koom Vally right here, on his doorstep. And what is it with the secret, ancient, feared Dwarf runes, talking of troubles mines, calling the Following Dark? And why is he forced to accept a Vampire into his troops, even if he hates Vampires? Read for yourself, if you dare to be entertained…
Felaheen is the 3rd (and final) book in Jon Courtenay-Grimwood's Arabesk sequence (after Pashazade and Effendi) – it was, at the time, Jon's 7th book, meanwhile he has 13 Novels to his name. Felaheen won the BSFA Award for Best Novel (he's won another BSFA Award since for End Of The World Blues).
The final instalment of this series finds Ashraf 'Raf' al-Mansur contacted by the chief bodyguard of his supposed (he doesn't believe it) father, the Emir of Tunis, asking for help following a nearly successful assassination attempt using a venomous snake. The main thing she can offer in exchange for his services (she tries to hire him) is information – she knew his mother, and might well know the secrets surrounding Raf's origin and birth. Nevertheless he turns her down, and instead starts his own investigations into his past.
I'm not going to spill more of the story – the entire book is a trip down memory lane – both figuratively in Raf's aimless search for his past, and literally in flashbacks telling brief episodes from the life history of Sally, Raf's mother; a small-time criminal and major anti-corporate activist involved in 'direct action'. The two threads kind of wind around and feed of each other, but only really come together towards the end. And even then you'll need your brain to connect some of the dots...
I'd like to draw your attention to two short stories I read (and enjoyed) recently - first up is Lavie Tidhar's Enter the Dragon. Later, Enter Another, a story craftily playing on the dissolution of reality in the wake of several Wikileaks. There's loads of name dropping, new concepts and technologies hinted at, and time going in loops - all handled with a similar lightness as the (also excellent) Dance Dance Revolution by Charlie Human.
And to up the weirdness stakes, considerably, I suggest you follow this with The Gallows-Horse, a story by Iranian author Reza Negarestani. It concerns, well, no. I'm not going to try, read it for yourelf. The closest comparison that my mind threw up is some of Ian Sinclair's work, although it doesn't completely reach the hypnotic pull away from reality that Sinclair at his best manages.
This is a re-post of an old review, originally published on Diversebooks (long defunct) for Double Full Moon Night, a Gentry Leesolo novel set in the Rama Universe, which ties up some strands from that series, whilst getting stuck on the same religious questions. If you liked the various Aliens in Rama then you’re gonna like this, too.
The story follows Johan Eberhardt, born on Earth, former Colonist on Mars, as he encounters a number of alien cultures, and interacts in various combinations with the other members of the group that was rescued/abducted (all a question of point of view) from Mars during the final days of the colonization effort. At the beginning we find him on an (artificial) island in an alien spaceship, raising his true love’s (Sister Beatrice of the Michaelites, RIP) child (conceived when she was raped) as his own. This basically sums up the topical content of the book – mysterious omnipotent aliens, artificial worlds, theological disputes, social interaction, and Johan’s relationship with ‘his’ child, Maria. The story is a series of varying combinations of the actors, in different alien-provided environments, interacting with changing groups of alien creatures of varying levels of intelligence and power in the spaceship most of the story plays in. If this is a Zoo, or a Research Station conduction experiments (and how would you, as an inmate, tell the difference?) is left open. There are entities at different levels in the alien hierarchy, with the ‘Ribbons’, enigmatic and very pretty particle beings, on tops of it. The Ribbons are the only spacefaring civilization that the Rama collective intelligence can’t figure out.
Felaheen
