TV Musings: Summer Sci-Fi

Recently, there has been a truly massive amount of science fiction and fantasy television to enjoy.  In fact, I believe there are around 100 active (airing, upcoming or returning) genre shows right now.  Put in that context, I feel like my watching habits are fairly modest, though I’d prefer to think I’m just highly selective and generally busy reading books.  Today I want to talk about the shows I have enjoyed in the summer of 2016.  All of the following shows have already been renewed, so there will be more to come next year! Did I miss one of your favorites?  Let me know in the comments!

Orphan Black (Season 4):  

Beware of spoilers for previous seasons in the second paragraph.

For anyone unfamiliar with the show, Orphan Black is the story of Sarah Manning, a con artist and single mother, who learns one day that she is a rogue clone from a clandestine, wide-reaching experiment. Over four seasons, Orphan Black has shown itself to be a show of consistently high quality, and has earned a number of awards that include an Emmy (for main actress Tatiana Maslany) as well as a Hugo Award for short form dramatic presentation.  Next year will bring us the final season, and I really hope the writers have an amazing ending in store.  For this year, I expect I’ll nominate “The Scandal of Altruism”, one of several particularly powerful episodes, for the Hugo award for short form dramatic presentation.

At the start of the fourth season, I was surprised to see the story jump in time to the days before clone Beth’s suicide.  The audience has only ever gotten to know Beth through the memories of others, so I was eager to see her world.  On the other hand, these past segments were emotionally intense, and it was hard to watch her suffer with the knowledge of how it would end.  When we returned to the modern day, things were lightened a bit with humor in the lives of criminal soccer mom Alison, ex-assassin Helena, and cosmetic conspiracy theorist Krystal.  Through the past and present, we learn more about Neolution, including the goals and origins of the movement. One last thing that I especially liked in this season is the continuing consideration of how Sarah’s self-absorption affects the people she loves.  Her relationship with Felix is a prime example, and I appreciated that we were able to see some aspects of his life that don’t revolve around Sarah’s drama.  

12 Monkeys (Season 2):

12 Monkeys is my favorite of Syfy’s latest serious scripted science fiction shows, and I’m happy that a third season has already been confirmed.  In a nutshell, the story is initially that of a small group of people who are trying to use time travel to prevent a plague that has wiped out most of humanity in their present.  By the second season, things have moved into a bit more mystical territory, and the main focus is to prevent the Army of the Twelve Monkeys (architects of the plague) from destroying time itself in order to live in an eternal now.

I was a little skeptical of the mystical turn, but the quality of the show was undiminished.  The plot is even more clever and intricate than the first season, and it continues to push the boundaries of how time travel can be used in storytelling.  I enjoyed seeing how Cole, Ramse, Cassie, Jennifer and Jones changed as they face the painful consequences of their actions in this and the previous season.  I really love this cast and how well they play off of one another. On a side note, I was slightly disappointed that Jennifer’s mental health problems were given a supernatural origin.  At the same time, Jennifer also sought psychiatric help and learned to manage her condition with medication, so the writers kind of took this both ways. I think I’ll probably nominate “Lullaby” for a Hugo this year, a fairly self-contained episode where our time travelers attempt to protect time by traveling backward and killing the inventor of time travel (Katarina Jones) just after the death of her daughter.

Stranger Things (Season 1):

I think I and pretty much everyone else on the internet enjoyed this one.  Netflix is putting out some really quality original programming these day. I didn’t know what to expect going in, except that it was some sort of 80’s style sci-fi thriller.  The story involves the disappearance of neighborhood kid Will, whose distraught friends come across a mysterious, frightened, and powerful young girl named “Eleven” during their search for him.  Eleven has escaped from some kind of government compound, whose activities may put the town in danger.

I really liked the consistency of the 80’s vibe (the set, behavior, costumes, etc.).  The story also had a sense of nostalgia, and it was easy to binge-watch the whole season.  I also liked that, while violent things happened, it wasn’t as grimdark as some shows get these days.  I think sometimes I just want to watch a story about people stopping a nefarious government plot and rescuing a little kid, and I don’t want it to have a depressing ending.  On a last note, I liked that this one didn’t go the route of having clueless adults and hero kids.  Each age group tried to solve the problems in front of them as best they could, and for the most part they all believed one another.

Killjoys (Season 2):

Killjoys is another Syfy scripted show, which I thought showed a lot of promise in its first season. The show followed a team of three ‘killjoys’--Dutch, D’avin and John--who take on reclamation contracts for a living.  Dutch is the all-around leader, D’avin is a veteran who specializes in physical, and John is his little brother, who speciailzes in the technical side.  The end of the first season was a game changer, and the three of them became more embroiled in the violent politics of their star system.  After the events of the finale, they are still officially killjoys, but they only accept jobs that aid them in pursuing their own interests (allowing them to cross closed borders, etc.).

The world-building of the previous season pays off now, as there is a ton of story to tell in the Quad System.  I was impressed that just about every character in the show had their own arc. All the same, everything eventually ties neatly together into the broader story of the secrets of the system and the mysteries of Dutch’s past.  In more detail, the two major topics are the intentions behind the isolating wall that Qresh has put around Oldtown (in Westerly) after its bombing, and what is going on with the “Sixes”--sociopathic, self-healing assassins.  My only nitpicks about the show so far are pretty minor, such as the ridiculous spellings of the characters’ names (seriously, Khlyen? Pawter? D’avin?).  The end of the season marks another major shift in the premise, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.  I didn’t nominate any episode from season one for a Hugo, but I’m thinking that “Johnny Be Good” is award-worthy this time around.  

Dark Matter (Season 2):

Dark Matter is yet another Syfy show, and let me just say that I am loving how many space operas they have on their production list at the moment.  I thought the first season was promising, though it had some weaknesses.  Due to starting the series with mass amnesia, I felt like it took a really long time to firmly establish the characters beyond superficialities.  The world building is also a little unfocused, to the extent that I’m only starting to get a sense of the connections in their universe near the end of the second season.    

In the second season, the show suffered from a lack of focus.  Every single character had a subplot of their own, but they didn’t really seem to be building into anything larger.  There are hints of an imminent corporate war, but it doesn’t really seem to interest the crew of the Rasa all that much.  Also, with the way the story hops from one character’s personal story to another, sometimes the revelations and climaxes feel a little rushed.  On the positive side, all of these unconnected stories are really entertaining. There’s Portia’s history as a deadly science experiment, Android’s exploration of humanity, Ryo’s imperial succession family drama, tough-guy Markus’s uneasiness with his unsavory and grief-filled past, and more. I like the individual pieces, I just hope they build into something larger and more coherent in future seasons.

Review: They'd Rather Be Right/The Forever Machine, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

They’d Rather Be Right/The Forever Machine, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

Published: Astounding Science Fiction (Analog), 1954; Carroll & Graf, 1992

Awards Won: Hugo Award

The Book:

“When the government orders that a psychologist design an airplane autopilot system, the psychologist in question, Dr. Billings, promptly concludes that the only way forward is to build a machine that has all the capabilities of a human mind.  To aid in his endeavour, he recruits a lonely young telepath named Joe to help spur his team onward.

It soon becomes clear that what they are creating is something else entirely. Their new artificial intelligence, ‘Bossy’, is able to build an understanding of the universe from various facts fed into her by her creators.  She can then use her understanding to conduct psychological therapy on patients, rendering them telepathic and eternally youthful.  But what is the price for Bossy’s rejuvenation, and is the world ready?” ~Allie

This book has a reputation as one of the worst Hugo winners, so I knew what I was getting into when I picked it up.  I’d like to have read all of the Hugo winners one day, so that means checking out a few weaker books (I have yet to read The Wanderer) along with the good ones. In this case, I’d say the reputation was well earned. I actually read the later-published version of the novel, The Forever Machine, which also includes two related short stories.

My Thoughts:

A science fiction novel’s level of predictive power is not necessarily the most important gauge of it’s quality, but I think They’d Rather be Right is about as successful as these folk. Computer languages were a pretty new development in the 1950s, so I can see how it would be hard to predict what sorts of things would be easy, hard, or impossible with computing systems. In another area, I thought it was pretty funny that citizens in this fictional world found corporations to be more trustworthy than governments.  I know speculative fiction is bound to get some of its predictions wrong, but when something is this dated and off, it tends to get in the way of engaging with the story.

I was also not really aligned to the biases of the novel, which were applied to the narrative with a heavy-hand. For instance, there’s a strong anti-scientist and anti-education vibe, where educated people, particularly professors, are shown as having rigid mindsets and an inability to adapt to new situations.  This does not make sense to me, since it seems obvious that educated people must have chosen their path because they enjoy learning new things. There’s also a weird contempt for psychologists, paired with a respect for paranormal psychology.  All the ‘orthodox’ psychologists are portrayed as uncaring, arrogant, and incompetent. On the other hand, unconventional psychology is able to magically grant open-minded people eternal youth and telepathic powers. It’s possible that the novel might have been in line with some common ideas in the 1950s, but I don’t think it fits particularly well with our society’s reality anymore.  

The characters were also a bit inconsistent, and their actions did not always seem to follow how real people behave. For instance, Joe seems to have basically unlimited power to control the thoughts of all the people around him, but for some reason he seems to forget about this ability during a few crises they face.  In one of these crises, they are attacked by a mob of people who declare themselves to be on a witch hunt, and who use witch-hunt rhetoric.  I don’t know if things were different in the ‘50s, but nowadays the term ‘witch hunt’ is generally used as a derogatory term for a mob attacking innocent people over perceived differences.  It didn’t really make sense to me for a group to proudly claim the label for themselves. Given all of my complaints about the book, it might seem strange to say that I appreciated the way it ended.  If a magical psychology machine like Bossy did exist, their final approach to handling her existence is something I can get behind.

My Rating: 1.5/5

I think They’d Rather be Right was a pretty controversial Hugo win at the time, and it has since earned a reputation as one of the weakest Hugo award winners.  It hasn’t aged well at all, and many of its ideas about the future are entertainingly wrong.  The novel also carries some pretty blatant biases that I don’t agree with, which I find kind of ironic in a book that is about the need for humanity to throw off their prejudices and preconceptions.  I liked how they ended up dealing with Bossy, though, and parts of the story were pretty (unitentionally, I think) funny. Still, it was interesting to see what fans voted for as the best novel written in 1954. I would only recommend this one to other Hugo-winner completionists.

Review: Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

Published: Tor, 2011

Series: Book 3 of the Spin Sequence

Warning: This book is the final volume of a trilogy, so there are some spoilers of the first two books (Spin and Axis) ahead!

The Book:

“Turk Findley has been transported 10,000 years into the future by the Hypotheticals’ temporal arch, and now he has been taken in by a fanatical limbic democracy that expect him to facilitate their eventual glorious communion with those same Hypotheticals.  They are traveling through the series of arches that link the human worlds, moving back to the destroyed, uninhabitable Earth.

Turk is not the only survivor from his time.  Isaac Dvali, the experimental child who was created to communicate with the Hypotheticals, has also come through the temporal arch.  Turk’s other companion is Treya, a far future woman whose mind also contains the personality of a woman from his time, Allison Pearl.  In a twist of space and time, their story is filtered into the mind of a troubled young man from Turk’s past, Orrin Mather, who lives in the latter days of the dying Earth.  Tying past and future together, the story of the Spin is finally drawing to a close.” ~Allie

I’ve read a number of Robert Charles Wilson’s novels in the past, all of which I have reviewed on my blog.  I think that the more I read of his work, the more I enjoy his style of storytelling!  The Spin Sequence is a series of three novels that could be considered standalone, but which would be best read in order.  Vortex in particular feels like more of a sequel to Axis than to Spin, since it resolves the stories of two of the main characters of Axis, Turk and Isaac.  Robert Charles Wilson’s latest novel, The Affinities, will be coming out soon, on April 21st!

My Thoughts:

A different span of time is covered by each of the novels of the Spin Sequence.  Spin covered the lifetime of a group of people who experienced the night when the Hypotheticals’ shield first covered the Earth.  Axis occurred perhaps decades later, and covered specific events that occurred in a very short time frame.  Vortex ties the two schemes together with dual storylines: one that is compact in time, set in Turk’s youth, and one that is much more expansive, beginning 10,000 years later.  The two stories are connected through the character of Turk Findley and the personality of Allison Pearl, as well as by the mysterious transfer of Turk’s story from the future into the mind of Orrin Mather, a man from his past.

The two stories are linked in more subtle ways as well, such as by the development of the understanding of the Hypotheticals and by the fate of the damaged and eventually destroyed Earth.  I remember thinking in Spin that simply providing more fossil fuel resources to the Earth was not a great solution to the energy crunch problem, so I appreciated seeing the long-term effects of that play out here.  On a personal level, as well, the dual storylines address the act that has shaped and shadowed much of Turk’s life--his not-quite-accidental killing of a man, which is first mentioned in Axis.  Isaac also struggles with defining the meaning and purpose of his life, which was originally designed to serve the purposes of others.  I enjoyed the way the stories complemented each other, and was eager to learn what was behind their more mysterious, direct connection.

In addition to being nicely complementary, I felt that the two separate storylines were intriguing in their own rights.  In Turk’s past, the story was told from the point of view of the psychiatrist Sandra Cole, who is initially tasked with interviewing Orrin Mather to determine his suitability to be taken into a Texan involuntary psychiatric care system.  The cop on his case, Bose, introduces Sandra to Orrin’s story of Turk Findley’s future, and together they try to uncover the truth behind the origin of his writings and why someone seems to want him to be locked up.  The story covers a place and time in human history we haven’t seen much of in the trilogy, where the environment of the Earth is in decline and the Martian extended life treatment is a controversial issue.  The far-future is suitably strange, with the limbic democracy of the giant floating island of Vox, it’s hard-coded faith in the Hypotheticals, and the ‘cortical democracies’ that oppose them.  I enjoyed following Turk as he learned how things work in this strange new world, and saw both the appeal and horror of this particular new human way of life.  The conclusion of the series ties everything together, and it provides the kinds of revelations and explanations that I have been patiently waiting for since Spin without losing the story’s emotional, human core.  Altogether, I think this was an excellent conclusion to a highly entertaining series.

My Rating: 4.5/5  

Vortex provides a wonderful conclusion to a series that I have enjoyed, and it finally provides some of the answers to the questions first raised in Spin. The narrative manages to handle both large and small scale, by focusing on two storylines that are separated by 10,000 years.  Each of these stories are entertaining in their own right and complementary to one another, and they are tied together beautifully in the final act.  In the far future, the story follows Turk Findley, who has awaken to find himself a guest of the fanatical limbic democracy Vox, a mobile nation that is headed for the dead Earth and communion with the Hypotheticals.  His story is somehow transferred into the mind of Orrin Mather, a drifter who lived on the dying Earth in the time of Turk’s youth.  The novel relates the grandeur and horror of events that have shaped humanity and the universe, without losing touch with the emotional, human journey of its handful of characters.  I’m happy that the series has ended on such a high note, though I am a bit sad that my experience of this interesting universe and its characters has now come to a close.

Review: Nexus by Ramez Naam

Nexus: Mankind Gets an Upgrade by Ramez Naam

Published: Angry Robot Books, 2013

Series: Book 1 of Nexus 5

Awards Nominated: Arthur C. Clarke Award, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author

The Book:

“In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link humans together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it. When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he's thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage - for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes.

From the halls of academe to the halls of power, from the headquarters of an elite US agency in Washington DC to a secret lab beneath a top university in Shanghai, from the underground parties of San Francisco to the illegal biotech markets of Bangkok, from an international neuroscience conference to a remote monastery in the mountains of Thailand - Nexus is a thrill ride through a future on the brink of explosion.” ~WWEnd.com

Nexus is Naam’s first science fiction novel, though he has published non-fictional works. The second novel of the series, Crux, is already available.  I haven’t yet read the second, but it seems like this is going to be the kind of series where it is important to read in order.

My Thoughts:

Nexus is a techno-thriller about the effects of developments in mind-altering/linking technology.  The title is from a drug, Nexus, which allows people to temporarily link minds with other users.  The main character, Kaden Lane, has worked with his friends to create a new version “Nexus 5” (the series title) which installs a permanent network within a user’s mind.  With this network one can run applications on one’s own nervous system, and mentally connect with other users.  These apps can control your heart rate, the words you say, and even give you Bruce Lee style martial arts reflexes.  The last is no Matrix-level kung-fu app, though, since it can’t make an ordinary person comparable to someone who has actually been trained in combat.  The linking aspect of the technology also allows communication and control between multiple people’s minds, which is where many of the moral problems of this new technology arise.

I can’t deny that this sounds like a very cool idea, but it is also one that I hope is never developed.  There are so many uses this technology could have, ranging from the positive to the extremely negative.  The novel mostly addresses the extremities of this range—from psychological healing and meditation to mind control and manipulation of memory and personality.   I can see a whole range of negatives and positives in between these two extremes as well, though, which are not yet addressed in the story.  I mean, imagine a world where men on the street could harass you or send unsolicited pictures of their genitalia directly into your mind. Or on the even more mundane level, communicating with someone mind-to-mind would drastically change the accepted model of social interactions, and I imagine there would be a wave of global culture shock, even if the technology were dispersed peacefully.  All of this goes to say that I think this is a really fascinating idea, and it seems like there are so many directions this series could go with its premise.

For this first novel, though, the direction it goes is towards a pretty standard action-thriller format.  The Nexus technology was banned by the government (for good reason, I think), and agents have uncovered Kade’s Nexus 5 development group.  In exchange for the freedom of his friends, Kade is forced to work as a government agent.  He’s paired with his watchdog, super-agent Samantha Cataranes, and sent on a sting mission to investigate a potentially highly advanced Chinese scientist. Of course, there’s more going on than Kade knows, and he’s soon stuck in an impossible situation with no good choices and no one to trust.  The ensuing conflicts involve a whole lot of surprisingly intense and emotionally disturbing violence, so reader discretion is definitely advised.

In addition to the relatively standard plot format, the characters tended toward familiar clichés as well. The main characters include a counterculture-supporting, anti-government, idealistic scientist (Kade), and a human-weapon secret agent with an excessively tragic past (Sam).  Other characters include corrupt, bumbling government agents, mentally pure Buddhist monks, a veteran super-soldier with PTSD, and a scientist whose views remind me of Magneto.  They’re all interesting in terms of portraying different perspectives on the developing technology, but they still fall into familiar roles.  I also had some difficulty in feeling an emotional connection to the characters. In the case of Kade, his behavior in the first chapter, in an app-assisted sexual misadventure, left me thinking of him as a pretty sleazy guy.  In a general sense, though, I felt like there was a certain lack of consistency in the characters’ emotional reactions to traumatic situations. 

I think the strength of the story is really how it combines an intriguing technological idea with a fast-paced thriller plot.  The story doesn’t get bogged down in lengthy explanations, instead allowing the reader to build up a sense of the near-future world and the Nexus technology through the events of the story. The showing-over-telling when it comes to the technological aspects also kept the jargon down to a readable level and allowed the plot to progress quickly.  Ramez Naam is also a technologist and non-fiction writer, so it is a bit chilling to think that the technological developments may be reasonable extrapolations from existing technology.  The first novel feels like a complete story to me, but it also clearly leads in to the next book.  The way it ended really makes me want to know what will happen next, so I will probably read Crux at some point in the future!

My Rating: 3.5/5

Nexus is a techno-thriller that gives a chilling look into the direction mind-linking technology might take, and how it could change our world.  Nexus 5 is a system that can be run on a human mind, allowing networking between minds as well as a new level of control over one’s own body.  The story was fast-paced and exciting, though the intensity of the violence sometimes exceeded my comfort level.  The characters did not always seem emotionally consistent to me, and they also sometimes felt more like standard types representing various viewpoints than well-developed individuals.  However, I am very interested in these kinds of near-future stories about the effects of technology extrapolated forward from current research, and I will probably be continuing the series with the second novel, Crux!

Review: Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Published: Tor, 2007

Series: Book 2 of the Spin Sequence

Awards Nominated: John W. Campbell Memorial Award

The Book:

“In Spin’s direct sequel, Wilson takes us to the "world next door"--the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world--and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed--as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown.” ~WWEnd.com

This is the third book I’ve read by Wilson, after Spin and The Chronoliths, and I am planning to eventually read the final Spin Sequence novel, Vortex, which I have already purchased.  I think I hold a minority opinion, but I enjoyed Axis as much as if not more than Spin.

My Thoughts:

Axis is a sequel in the same universe as Spin, but it follows an almost entirely new cast of characters.  One could argue that the story is still about ordinary people attempting to cope with unexplained (and potentially unexplainable) phenomena, but that would also be a fair description of every Robert Charles Wilson novel I’ve read to date. The main active unexplained phenomenon this time is the ashfall, though humans are also still coping with the Arch that connects the Earth to the planet that has been named Equatoria.  In terms of the new planet, I enjoyed reading about what kinds of people moved there and what sort of organizational infrastructure developed.  It was kind of interesting how ordinary such a strange thing can become when it is a constant in everyone’s lives. The ashfall was more disruptive and undeniably strange, and attempts to understand it drive most of the plot.  In the end, I felt like the story was more about the ways people approach the search for understanding, rather than the answers they may or may not find.

  

The many ways to search for meaning were illustrated by the many viewpoint characters, each of which was trying to find or understand something. Lise was a recently divorced woman who was trying to learn what happened when her father vanished years ago.  Her ex-husband Brian provided a viewpoint from within a questionably corrupt organization, and he was set on his own path of discovery by Lise’s inquiries.  Lises’s sometimes-lover Turk aided her in her search, while also trying to figure out his own future.  Their investigation led them into a Fourth community, a group of people who had taken the Martan longevity treatment to gain a fourth stage of life.  This Fourth community was focused on the idea of communication with the Hypotheticals, with the Martian Sulean Moi and Avram Dvali supporting opposing views on the path to accomplish this.  In addition, there was the wonderkid Isaac, who some hoped would play an important role in understanding the Hypotheticals. With so many characters, there was naturally a bit less time to develop them all.  For this kind of story, though, I think it was more valuable to have many perspectives on the situation than to know one or two characters especially well.

The story may revolve around the search for the answers to various questions, but I think the novel was more concerned with the process of their search and the value of what they are able to understand.  In short, one should not really go into this novel expecting to get a definitive answer about the nature and purpose of the Hypotheticals.  There is some progress on this front, but much is left unexplained.  I was pretty satisfied with how the story wrapped up, both in terms of many of the characters’ arcs and with the new direction that it looks like the final novel will take. I’m looking forward to seeing the final conclusion of the series, in Vortex!

My Rating: 3.5/5

I thought that Axis was an excellent sequel to Spin, though it is a very different sort of book.  Axis is the story of many characters over a short time span, most of which characters are newly introduced in this novel. The characters may not be as deeply explored as in Spin, but I appreciated having many different perspectives on the events of the story.  I enjoyed seeing what happened with the world through the Arch, and how humanity managed to make this new marvel feel commonplace.  The ashfall and a Fourth community’s goal to communicate with the Hypotheticals provided a new mystery, and the ending still left many questions unanswered. I am curious to see how the final novel will (or maybe won’t) answer them!

Review: The Integral Trees by Larry Niven

The Integral Trees by Larry Niven

Published: Ballantine Del Rey, 1984

Series: Book 2 of The State

Awards Won: Locus SF Award

Awards Nominated: Nebula and Hugo Awards

The Book:

“When leaving Earth, the crew of the spaceship Discipline was prepared for a routine assignment. Dispatched by the all-powerful State on a mission of interstellar exploration and colonization, Discipline was aided (and secretly spied upon) by Sharls Davis Kendy, an emotionless computer intelligence programmed to monitor the loyalty and obedience of the crew.

But what they weren't prepared for was the smoke ring-an immense gaseous envelope that had formed around a neutron star directly in their path. The Smoke Ring was home to a variety of plant and animal life-forms evolved to thrive in conditions of continual free-fall. When Discipline encountered it, something went wrong. The crew abandoned ship and fled to the unlikely space oasis.

Five hundred years later, the descendants of the Discipline crew living on the Smoke Ring no longer remember their origins. Earth is more myth than memory, and no recollection of the State remains. But Kendy remembers. And just outside the Smoke Ring, Discipline waits patiently to make contact with its wayward children.” ~WWEnd.com

I chose The Integral Trees as the Locus SF award winner for my 2014 12 Awards in 12 Months Challenge. 

My Thoughts:

Above all, the setting in The Integral Trees was extremely cool. It’s a colonization story, but instead of settling on a planet, the humans settled in a gas torus around a neutron star, in a binary star system.  It was clear that a lot of thought went into what kind of environment this would create, what kinds of creatures would develop in that environment, and how humans would adapt to survive over time, with their planet-evolved biology. The origin of the system, the mechanics of how it persists, and the forces that would be exerted on lifeforms within the torus (especially the large integral trees) is also explored in a lot of detail.  This is definitely a story where the science is very fun, very thorough and very creative.

  

While the story begins 500 years after the colonization, their society still has lingering marks of their past as a part of a civilization of higher technology.  For instance, words have persisted through the years, though many have drifted in pronunciation or meaning.  They also still value science, and each community has their own Scientist, who is able to access information from ancient machines.  It’s not so long since I was a grad student myself, so I enjoyed that the scientist’s apprentice was known as the Grad. The adventures of the main group led them through many different communities in the Smoke Ring, and it was neat to see the differences and similarities between them. Some of these communities, though, show a pretty dark view of future-humanity, with respect to slavery and the sexual exploitation of women.

The main party is a group of community misfits, sent out from their home in search of food in a time of lasting famine. The party has some of the usual adventurer types—a scientist, an alpha male (and his small harem), and a promising young man—but it also includes some more unusual people, such as a bitter elderly man, and several people with physical handicaps.  They also meet up with others along the way, including a woman warrior. While the ‘promising young man’ Gavving is probably the main character, the story follows different party members at different points.  They were a pretty interesting group of people to follow, but I think that having so many of them limited the amount to which each could be developed.

In the end, I feel like this is almost a setting-driven story, where the plot and characters are primarily focused around showcasing and exploring different parts of the physical and human environments. The events of the story were very action-oriented and exciting, but it seemed mostly like a series of adventures designed to propel the characters through different parts of their world.  This, in addition to the way Kendy’s situation concluded, led to the ending being a little underwhelming. However, I still enjoyed cheering on the group of explorers as they struggled to stay together and survive through many different hardships.  

My Rating: 3.5/5

The Integral Trees is a basic party exploration adventure story, but with a really fascinating environment to explore.  Instead of colonizing a planet, humans colonized a kind of space ‘trees’ living in a gas torus within a binary star system.  I was really drawn in by the amount of thought and creativity behind the description of the physical setting and its extrapolation to how native life would develop and humans would adapt.  The characters were a little simple in comparison, but they made for a fun group to follow as they traveled through such an impressive world.

Review: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Published : Avon/Gollancz (1995)

Awards Won : Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell 

Awards Nominated : British Science Fiction Association

The Book :

“Before he met the brilliant, hypnotic child Milena, Alex Sharkey had never played with "dolls"—blue-skinned, gengineered lifeforms designed for work, amusement, or destruction. But the underground gene-hacker is seduced by a megalomaniacal little girl's dream of providing the soulless genetic constructs with free thought and a future—and he unwittingly unleashes a plague of madness on the world.

Now there's a void in his life and memory that must be refilled, but it means pursuing the dangerous sentient species he helped sire from the ruins of a Magic Kingdom through a wasted Europe. It is Alex Sharkey's last chance and the last hope remaining for a once-dominant human race.” ~WWEnd.com

This is the first book I’ve read by Paul McAuley, and one that I started in 2013 and finished in 2014, making it ineligible for my 2014 Challenges.

My Thoughts:

There’s plenty to unpack in the novel Fairyland, from the bleak, complex future setting, the mix of cyberpunk and fantasy tone, and even the structure of the narrative.  Fairyland shows a violent, unstable future, where identity is a very malleable concept.  Nanotechnology exists that can easily manipulate people’s beliefs, motivations and memories.  The commercially produced “dolls” seem to have no identities at all, at least until their programming is illegally modified to turn them into “fairies”, with a fragile sentience.  The world was often disturbing, but I also found it very interesting to see such a dark portrayal of what humans would do with these kinds of future technology.

The main plot of the stoy involves Alex’s search for the little girl Milena, across several countries.   The story is split into three sections, each with their own separate subplots and additional viewpoint characters.  The first part is a gangster story set in London, where Alex first becomes involved with “fairies”.  The second is set near Paris, where a group of child-abducting fairies have turned the abandoned Disneyland resort into a nightmare.  In the third section, the quest draws to its conclusion.  While Alex’s search for Milena runs through all three sections, they sometimes seemed a little disconnected.  Many of the characters vanish when their section ends, and their subplots don’t always seem to have much bearing on the central story.  However, the details that are introduced through their experiences—about the fairies, Milena’s possible intentions, and the manipulation of identity--help build up to the final conclusion.

It’s with the fairies that a kind of fantasy atmosphere is folded into a rather hard science fiction novel. The fairies have a scientific explanation for their existence, but they also follow many cultural ideas about fairy kind.  For instance, these fairies are cruel, enigmatic and capricious, they steal children, they have ‘glamours’, and (through future technology) they can induce hallucinations of a fantastical world in their victims.  It is with the fairies that the story reached its most nightmarishly surreal. Unfortunately, though, the way they were portrayed made the fairies seem so distant and unsympathetic that it was difficult to feel positively about their rise to sentience.

In addition to the fairies, I found it rather hard to sympathize with most of the characters of the novel. Alex Sharkey is the primary character, and he is a man with a geas laid upon him (by nanotechnology) to follow the genius girl Milena.  This completely changes his life and his goals, and it bothered me that both the story and his character development were dominated by such an external factor.  I found some of the minor viewpoint characters (including a deserter with a ware-personality and a compassionate aid worker) to be more interesting, but their time in the story seemed too brief.  Overall, I think there is a lot to enjoy about Fairyland, but I never really felt a strong enough connection with the characters to become deeply enough invested in the story.

My Rating: 3/5
Fairyland was a novel that I appreciated more than I enjoyed.  It takes place in a bleak but fascinating future, where peoples’ minds are easily manipulated by nanotechnology and blue-skinned gengineered “dolls” are in common use.   The story follows Alex’s pursuit of the genius girl Milena, after they jointly uplift these dolls into sentient “fairies”.  While the ideas were really interesting, I always felt a little too detached from the characters, including the fairies, to ever become really drawn into the story.  Though it’s not exactly to my current tastes, I think it is a book that was worth reading.