I picked upLittle Brother, Cory Doctorow's 4th fiction novel, as a promotional copy at this year's National UK Science Fiction convention (aka Eastercon). Cory, co-editor of BoingBoing, and ex-EFF employee, is the winner of a Locus Award, plus the Prometheus, Sunburst, and John W Campbell Awards for this book. He also has a number of non-fiction books, and a graphic novel to his name, and his latest book, For the Win, is out this year. Little Brother tells the story of Marcus Yallow, a student of 17 years, living in San Francisco, in the (very) near future. A San Francisco which has just seen the worst post-911 terrorist attack, having its Bay Bridge blown up, with a loss of thousands of lives. At the time of the attack we find Marcus out on the street, having evaded school surveillance to play Harajuku Fun Madness, an online/offline game with his team. He, and his 3 friends, are picked up by the DHS (Department of Homeland Security – yes, they're real), and are held without charge or access to a lawyer and questioned for days in a secret prison, under accusation of being in league with the terrorists. When he is released, forbidden to talk about any of what has happened to him, he find his town under siege from the DHS, the Constitution of the US partially suspended under the Patriot II act; with ubiquitous surveillance and Police harassment. Having been a bit of a digital/ anti-surveillance rebel in his school beforehand he now starts pushing back against the loss of freedom and privacy, which obviously wakes the ire of the DHS.
Now here's a really great book that's being let down by its title and cover (some kind of dragon flying) – I'm allergic (ok, ok, intolerant) to cheap Fantasy, and that's the message the package sends. It couldn't be further from the truth, though – this is Space Opera, with a philosophical and poetical slant, and miles ahead of most of the pack.
But first things first... “There is History, and there is No History” - Opening words of the game of Makrugh (they come in several variants)
The story told in Somtow Sucharitkul's The Darkling Wind, after some formal introductions (one of the main protagonists is a playwright in a highly formalized area), kicks off on the planet of Essondras, which is about to fall behind, ie be obliterated as the final act in a game of Makrugh. Makrugh is played between members of the High Inquest, and always ends with the destruction of a planet, and its civilization. Ir Jenjen – a Darkweaver, creating art by combining scenes in all colours to create dark artefacts, and Zalo - a Playwright, Necrodramatist and Corpse Dancer, both join the Revolution, led by Kelver, himself an Inquestor bu bent on bringing down the High Inquest. Kelver is known under a number of names, including Prince of Shadows and the Darkling Wind of the title, and he occupies the Throne of Madness (charming, no?), which contains the main part of the soul of the Thinkhive of Uran s'Varek, which sits at the centre of the Galaxy.
How do I avoid making this sound like cheap Fantasy? It's not, take my word for it...
Excession is the 5th book inIain M Bank's Culture series (if you count State of the Art, the short story collection) - this is a story focussing on Ships, Ship Minds, and the groupings, games, and politics amongst themselves as well as within the wider Culture.
2500 years ago, a ship found a dead star, estimated to be 3 trillion years old. Given that this is about 50 times the age of the universe this was a rather odd result. Next to the star it found an artefact – a black-body sphere, impenetrable by scans, or anything else. And then the artefact, and the star, vanished. Now the artefact is back, and is found by a ship of the Zetetic Elench, a splinter group who try not to change the cultures etc they encounter, but to be changed by them. Their ship is taken over, completely and swiftly, and is only just able to send a warning to the Culture, who in turn engage the 'Interesting Times Gang' of old-time ship minds to manage this potential OCP they call the 'Excession'.
Orbus is the 3rd book inNeal Asher's Spatterjay sequence, and it's a worthy addition to the series, even if it's a bit different from the two that went before (The Skinner, and Voyage of the Sable Keech). The book picks up where 'Voyage of the Sable Keech' stopped – we find Old Captain Orbus, who gives the book its name, as captain of the space ship Gurnard now, outbound from Spatterjay, and on the search for his sanity and balance of mind. One of his old ship mates, Drooble, has also hired as crew. Plus we get two stowaways who urgently need to get away from the place – Sniper and 13 (still in his sea horse body) have smuggled themselves into the Cargo Hold in a large crate.
Orbus (and the Gurnard AI, more importantly) are being contracted by a Reif (a reification, literally a moving, embalmed dead body with the mind of its current and former occupant on a crystal, controlling it) named Cymbeline to retrieve a Prador carapace from a space station in the Graveyard, the demilitarized zone between the Policy and the Prador 3rd Kingdom. Arriving there they stumble over a Prador agent, so it's very convenient (overly so, actually) to have an Old Captain and a war drone on board who both hate the Prador, and who have experience of battling them.
Involution OceanisBruce Sterling's first published Novel – and I very nearly threw it back on the 'read sometimes later' pile after reading the blurb on the back: "The only habitable portion of Nullaqua is a handful of islands at the bottom of an immense crater. Surrounding the islands is a sea of the finest dust. And in the sea live the dust whales whose bodies yield Flare, a potent, exhilarating drug."
What does this sound like? Cheap Dune rip-off, anyone? But fear not Dear Reader, it isn't … except in the very brief summary/blurb there are no similarities with Dune; this story has it's very own scenario and storyline.
The story takes place in the crater mentioned in the blurb – one heck of a crater it is; 70 miles deep, 500 miles across, and is filled with near-mono-atomic dust. As the only part of Nullaqua (now there's a descriptive name for you) that has breathable air and is thus inhabitable, it has some rather interesting flora, fauna, and of course history. The area just outside the crater sports the ruins of two Elder Culture Outposts, which makes the main human industry (Dust Whaling on the surface of the Dust lake of indeterminate depth) a rather interesting one if you think about it for a while. The story follows the steps of one John Newhouse, connaisseur of the drug Flare, who ventures onto a Dust Whaler (Lunglance, captained by Nils Desperandum) to secure future provisioning of the drug, made from Dustwhale oil. On the Luglance he meets Dalusa, a winged, surgically beautiful alien, and embarks on a rather unusual relationship with her (Dalusa is allergic to physical contact with him).
Marcus Chown is the 'Cosmology Consultant' (whatever that is) for the New Scientist, and The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead is booked as 'Dispatches from the Front Line of Science". It contains a number of loosely aligned essays on a wide variety of topics of cutting edge/fashionable/speculative (delete as inclined) science, mainly around cosmology and large/general scale concepts; i.e. very little in terms of application, or even applicability.
The contents, at least for me, fell into three distinct categories. On the one hand there is, for want of a better term, 'classic advanced science' like General and Specific Relativity, parts of Quantum Theory and similar things. These are well written, informative (if a tad too dumbed down from my point of knowledge), and frequently entertaining. A good read.
Excession
Orbus
Involution Ocean 
