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…
This is a fascinating book, with some flaws that, sadly, can seriously distract from parts of it. It follows two separate strands – on the one hand we see the life of Dr. John Dee, 16th Century Mathematician, Mystic, Magus, and Astronomer to Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth and her Spy-master, Walsingham. And on the other we follow Alivet Dee (it’s not much of a spoiler to let you know that the last name is no co-incidence), a Apprentice Apothecary, working with Drugs and Perfumes, on the planet Latent Emanation (no, I won’t spoil where that name comes from). Alivet lives on a shoestring, saving all her money to be able, soon, to pay for the release of her twin sister Inkiretta, who has been embonded by the Unpriests, to serve the Lords of Night. You have to see, Latent Emanations’ society has 3, or rather 4 very distinct strata. You have the ordinary human citizens like Alivet, then you have a class of Unpriests and the 9 Families, and above them the reclusive, non-human and inhuman Lords of Night. The 4th layer is at the very bottom, or rather a bit outside of that pyramid, and consists of the Anube, a kind of Jackal-headed bipeds, who were native to Latent Emanation (or whatever they called the planet – the humans, as usual, didn’t care to ask) when the human settlers were brought there by the Lords. And the story kick off as one of Alivet’s potions goes wrong, leaving a (rich) customer dead, and now we have Alivet on the run…
Here are a few words onKen McLeod's magnificent first novel, The Star Fraction, the first in a series of 4 (or, at least, that's the most usual count – it's not straight-forward apparently) called The Fall Revolution. More than worth the read, and something I should have read long ago, but how many books can this be said about! Either way, this is a recommendation for those who have not been here before.
Moh Kohn is a mercenary, working for the Felix Dzershinksy Worker's Defense Collective, taking on contracts to protect research establishments from Crawls (AI abolitionists) and Creeps (animal protectionists). Or, in his own words: those who considered anything smarter than a pocket calculator a threat to the human race, and those who considered anything with a central nervous system a honorary member of it.
Here are my notes from reading Cowl, a stand-alone novel (save for a short story in the same universe) by Neal Asher, and can recommend it as the best Asher I've read so far. In a nutshell it's the story of Polly, a 22nd Century human, who gets tangled up in a war, raging across history, between two factions of 43rd Century post-humans civilizations, plus the Preterhuman Cowl, who sits and waits for his prey at the beginning of life on Earth. Definitely one for your reading pile.
Some history first – after the Muslim Jihad, the Resource Wars and the following Nuclear Winter Civilization as we know it fell, mainly due to our unfortunate tendency 'to breed weak humans and strong plagues' – ie our medicine and abuse of antibiotics. Out of this 2nd Dark Ages the Umbrathane (literally 'those who lead out of shadow') arose, breeding humans, exterminating weak strands, the full hog of Eugenics, way beyond anything the Nazis and Stalinists every did. But the Umbrathane fell into factions, fighting amongst themselves, and from this emerged, in the 43rd Century, the Heliothane Dominion (the Heliothane were their Engineers – talk about the Geek inheriting the Earth!) taking over, and exterminating all other factions who didn't escape or accede to the empire/dominion. Together with those Umbrathane that fled into the past there went the Preterhuman Cowl, the result of genetic cross-breeding, both apex and ultimate failure of the Heliothane breeding ambition.
