Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

Published: Baen, 1988

Series: Vorkosigan Saga, Book 1

Awards: Nebula

Nominated: Hugo

The Book:

“Leo Graf was an effective engineer...Safety Regs weren't just the rule book he swore by; he'd helped write them. All that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat. Leo was profoundly uneasy with the corporate exploitation of his bright new students—till that exploitation turned to something much worse. He hadn't anticipated a situation where the right thing to do was neither safe, nor in the rules...

Leo Graf adopted 1000 quaddies—now all he had to do was teach them to be free. “  ~barnesandnoble.com

I’m finally starting Bujold’s “Vorkosigan Saga” from the very beginning!  Falling Free occurs first in the internal chronology of the series, but it doesn’t feature any of the Vorkosigan family.  Instead this is the origin story of “quaddies”, genetically engineered beings that have two extra arms instead of legs, and are designed to live and work in zero-g.  This seems to be a much better starting place for the series than Cryoburn, if only because it does not assume that the reader is familiar with any people or locations. 

My Thoughts:

Falling Free is a rather simple, straightforward space adventure.  In terms of plot, characterization, and morality, it is much more blunt than I am used to reading from Bujold.  This is not necessarily much of a problem, since I think that it was intended to be a fast, pleasant story about good triumphing over evil.  The blatant moral message is that enslaving people is wrong.  I highly doubt anyone with a shred of decency would disagree.  However, the issue is slightly complicated by the consideration of what constitutes personhood.  The question of what defines a non-human (quaddies are classified as a non-human species) as a person is only addressed lightly in the story, but I think that it a topic worthy of discussion.

The quaddies are designed by a corporation that sees them as very expensive ‘experimental tissue’ instead of people.  Therefore, the company retains rights over their environment, reproduction, and even their lives. The question of their personhood is simplified greatly by the fact that they think and behave exactly like human beings.  Given this, I thought the human staff’s casual acceptance of the quaddies’ predicament was a little hard to swallow. I found myself wondering how the story would have played out if the situation were less clear-cut.  If the quaddies were designed to have the cognitive abilities of an animal, would anyone care about their enslavement?  What if they were given a slightly sub-human level of intelligence?  If either of those situations had been the case, then the untroubled attitudes of most of the human staff would have seemed a little more believable.

Most of the characters are fairly simple, and they fall into easily recognizable roles.  Leo Graf is the reluctant hero.  Even though he risks losing everything he’s ever worked for, he finds himself unable to leave the quaddies to exploitation and possible death.  The villainous Bruce Van Atta and the GalacTech Corporation are unrelentingly evil.  Their abuse of their power over their charges makes the eventual rebellion both necessary and inevitable.  The quaddies themselves are mostly docile and friendly by design, and they are raised in the completely controlled environment of an orbital habitat.  There is a pair of quaddie lovers, Tony and Claire, who found that the corporation didn’t really respect their ideas of love and sexual loyalty.  The most interesting quaddie was Silver, a naïve woman who had been drawn into prostituting herself for information and entertainment from the outer world.  While none of the characters were particularly complex, they fit the tone of the story well.

The story mostly concerned itself with the quaddies realizing their desire for freedom and trying to find a way, with Leo Graf’s help, to acquire it.  It seemed that any time there was a hint of ambiguity about which path was right, the villains (Van Atta and GalacTech) would do something even more horrible, forcing the heroes hands.   I found that a little disappointing, because it seemed to remove the necessity for the heroes to make any truly difficult decisions.  However, there were still enough interesting challenges in the heroes’ way to keep the story exciting.  It was a fun, easy story to read, and I was definitely cheering for Leo Graf and his 1,000 ‘adopted’ quaddies!

My Rating: 3.5/5

Falling Free is was a quick, light, sci-fi adventure novel.  While the premise and the characters are relatively simple, it’s still an exciting story with heroes that are easy to like and villains that are easy to hate. It would have been interesting to have a little more exploration of what constitutes personhood in a non-human species, but that absence didn’t really damage my enjoyment of the story.  I’m guessing the quaddies will show up later in the “Vorkosigan Saga”, and I’m looking forward to possibly seeing how their space-based culture will develop!

Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Published: Roc, 1992

Nominations: BSFA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award

The Book:

“From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver.

When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible.” ~Amazon.com

This is my second Neal Stephenson book, after reading his dense but fantastic The Diamond Age.  I can certainly see that Snow Crash is a very different book, though it’s still a fun read.  I read Snow Crash as a part of the 2011 book club over at Calico Reaction.

My Thoughts:

Snow Crash did seem kind of like a precursor to The Diamond Age’s scattered narrative style.  The point of view occasionally hopped to minor characters, such as the cyborged guard-dog Fido, or the Kourier Y.T.’s Mom, and there were many different concurrent storylines to enjoy.  However, Snow Crash was not nearly as diffuse, and it was clear in the end how each of these plots tied in together.  The ending itself is nearly as abrupt as in The Diamond Age, and I felt like there was at least some sense of closure on all of the storylines. The writing style in Snow Crash was also much less dense, and it was much more of an action-focused narrative.  This made it seem like a faster read, but it also left most of the characters seeming a little flat.

Even if they lacked depth, the characters are colorful and flashy enough to make for an exciting story.  The main character is the obvious Hiro Protagonist, hacker, master swordfighter, and, briefly, pizza deliveryman.  The secondary protagonist is Y.T. (Yours Truly), a fifteen year old girl skateboarding Kourier.  She delivers packages by magnetically harpooning fast-moving vehicles on the highways, and she ends up forming a loose business partnership with Hiro.  I felt like Y.T. was a more interesting and active character than Hiro.  Y.T. got herself into all kinds of interesting situations through her recklessness and irrational lack of self-preservative fear. Hiro, on the other hand, splits his time between sword-fighting and hanging out online to learn about ancient Sumeria.  They’re both kind of self-consciously ‘badass’, and they mostly behaved like invincible action movie heroes.  The minor characters are no less over-the-top, including the ‘main villain’ Raven, a massive Aleut biker who carries a nuclear warhead in his sidecar.

The story revolves around a fictional drug called ‘Snow Crash’, which is a kind of ancient Sumerian neurolinguistic virus.  I enjoyed the information about ancient Sumerian language, culture and religion and the ideas about programming human minds through language. However, most of this information is imparted through a series of massive info-dumps, as Hiro learns about it from a ‘Librarian’ program. These sections seemed to throw off the pacing of the book, as the story leapt from detailed discussions of ancient Sumerian mythology to flashy action scenes and back again.  While the action was entertaining, as well, it was somewhat cartoonish.  There were tons of flashy, futuristic gadgets and extravagant violence. I’ve read somewhere that Snow Crash came into existence as an idea for a graphic novel, and I think I can see that influence.

To me, the most interesting aspect of the book was its prophetic view of future technology. Snow Crash was written in 1992, when the Internet was just starting to come into common usage for the general public.  He predicted all kinds of trends, such as the move towards mobile computing, and the rise of cell phones.  He also predicted some very specific services.  His application ‘Earth’ is so similar to Google Earth that I wonder if Snow Crash was actually an influence in its development.  He also imagined an online information hub called the Library, to which information could be added by users (like Wikipedia?) and a perpetually existing Internet world through which people navigated using avatars, called the Metaverse (MMOs, Second Life, etc?). 

However, in Stephenson’s society, Earth and the Library were very expensive to access. I found it kind of humorous that people could earn money in Snow Crash by sharing information in the Library, whereas in today’s world millions of people are eager to share information for free.  In reality, I think that more money is to be made in the business of restricting information.  While some of the details in the comparisons I’ve made don’t quite match up, I really enjoyed looking at the similarities and differences between Stephenson’s vision of the future with our actual future.  

My Rating: 4/5

Snow Crash, published in 1992, gives an intriguing vision of the future. While Snow Crash has become pretty dated, I think that Stephenson got enough right, or close to right, to keep discussions of his envisioned future technology interesting.  The story itself is packed with over-the-top characters and cartoonish action sequences.  From master swordsman, hacker, and pizza deliveryman Hiro, to highway skateboarding Y.T., to nuclear warhead-wielding Raven, the characters make up for in height what they lack in depth.  The ideas about ancient Sumerian hackers of human minds and neurolinguistic viruses are farfetched, but interesting.  However, constantly jumping between the high-energy action and quiet discussions of Sumeria led to some uneven pacing.  For the most part, Snow Crash is a fun, clever story that never takes itself too seriously. 

Review: Feed by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)

This review also appears as a guest post on WorldsWithoutEnd.com. Worlds Without End (WWEnd) is a wonderful site for fans of science fiction and fantasy literature.  It has forums, blogs containing news, reviews, and author interviews, and an extensive database with information on authors, publishers, and novels.  WWEnd follows 10 major SF/F awards, and it boasts many categorized lists of novels that can help introduce readers to new experiences.  Members can create their own 'virtual bookshelves', organize reading lists, and rate and review books they've read.  For these and many other reasons, I recommend WWEnd as a site not to miss for anyone with an interest in science fiction and fantasy.

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Feed by Mira Grant

Published: Orbit, 2010

Nominated: Hugo Award

The Book:

“In 2014, two experimental viruses—a genetically engineered flu strain designed by Dr. Alexander Kellis, intended to act as a cure for the common cold, and a cancer-killing strain of Marburg, known as "Marburg Amberlee"—escaped the lab and combined to form a single airborne pathogen that swept around the world in a matter of days. It cured cancer. It stopped a thousand cold and flu viruses in their tracks.

It raised the dead.

Millions died in the chaos that followed. The summer of 2014 was dubbed "The Rising," and only the lessons learned from a thousand zombie movies allowed mankind to survive. Even then, the world was changed forever. The mainstream media fell, Internet news acquired an undeniable new legitimacy, and the CDC rose to a new level of power.

Set twenty years after the Rising, the Newsflesh trilogy follows a team of bloggers, led by Georgia and Shaun Mason, as they search for the brutal truths behind the infection. Danger, deceit, and betrayal lurk around every corner, as does the hardest question of them all:

When will you rise?

When Senator Peter Ryman of Wisconsin decides to take a team of bloggers along on his run for the White House, Georgia and Shaun Mason are quick to submit their application. They, along with their friend Georgette "Buffy" M. are selected, and view this as the chance to launch their careers to a whole new level...that is, if they can survive the campaign trail.”

~MiraGrant.com

I chose to read Feed due to its recent Hugo nomination.   I admit that I set out to read it with a bit of a positive bias.  I’ve never read anything by Seanan McGuire (Mira Grant’s real name) before, but I’m a pretty big fan of zombie apocalypse stories.  I’ve watched zombie apocalypse movies, read other zombie novels, such as World War Z, and comics, and I often play zombie survival video games.  All of this may have slightly skewed my opinion of Feed, but I’m pretty sure that I would have loved it regardless.    

My Thoughts:

Rather than recounting the zombie apocalypse, Feed takes place as the first generation with no memories of a pre-Rising world comes into adulthood.  At this point, zombies are a constant, but manageable, threat.  While there’s certainly some zombie action scattered throughout the book, it’s the human characters that take center stage.  Georgia (George), Shaun and Buffy are 20-something bloggers who are the first non-traditional news media to be included in the coverage of a presidential campaign.  It’s a great opportunity for them, until things take a turn for the dangerous and they begin to uncover potentially deadly secrets.  While the basics of the mystery might be a little bit predictable, I did not feel like that significantly detracted from the draw or emotional effectiveness of the story.  The fascinating characters, complex world-building, and several unforeseen plot twists along the way more than made up for any predictability in the basic structure.

George, Shaun and Buffy intrigued me from the beginning, and I only grew to like them more as the book progressed.  As professional bloggers, they keep themselves under near-constant surveillance, and they each have a carefully cultivated public personality. George, the viewpoint character, is considered a “Newsie” blogger, who reports the news with as little bias as possible.  Her persona is sarcastic, hard-nosed, and aggressive.  Thanks to her ‘retinal-KA’ (a zombie-related eye infection), she always wears sunglasses to protect her permanently dilated eyes from light.  I empathized with her immediately over her eye problems.  As a nearsighted person, I’ve regularly had my eyes dilated, and I can attest to how annoying it is. Her adopted brother Shaun, an “Irwin”, uses his blog to provide thrills to people hiding safe in their homes.  He tries to cultivate a carefree, daredevil attitude, and constantly gets himself into exciting and dangerous situations.  Buffy is a “Fictional”, who has a fondness for writing sappy poetry. She presents herself as friendly, eccentric, and kind of flaky, but she’s also a highly skilled tech who takes care of all the electronics.  We learn more about them, and their styles of blogging, in interesting excerpts from their blog files that are inserted between the chapters.

While these public personae are the first impressions we get of George, Shaun, and Buffy, there’s much more to them than the ‘characters’ they play.  George is an uncompromising reporter, but she’s also a young woman from a troubled home life, who worries about the safety of her thrill-seeking brother.  Shaun might act like an “Irwin”, but he’s also a stickler for safety measures in field situations, and he has an unexpected temper beneath his carefree veneer.  Buffy might seem flighty, but she has depth to her that no one would expect.  Also, none of them have ever really lost anything significant as a result of the zombie uprising.  In this careful, post-Rising world, even though they regularly encounter zombies, they still have the typical youthful sense that disasters are something that happen to other people. I greatly enjoyed slowly growing to know and care about these characters over the course of Senator Ryman’s campaign trail.  Aside from the three of them, there was a multitude of minor characters, such as Senator Ryman, his wife, the latecomer blogger Rick, and other bloggers.  While they are not explored in nearly as much detail, they do enrich the world that George, Shaun, and Buffy inhabit. 

It’s not only the many characters that make the world they inhabit so satisfyingly intricate. Grant goes into great detail describing the post-Rising society, the post-Rising blogosphere, the zombie virus, and how people have changed as a result of it all.  In particular, the explanation of the zombie virus is one of the most thorough and interesting I’ve ever seen. To greatly simplify Grant’s explanation, the Kellis-Amberlee (zombie) virus has actually spread in a dormant state through the entire world.  Upon death or contact with an active virus (e.g., a zombie bite), the virus takes over the living creature, turning it into a zombie.  Not only humans are susceptible to the virus, but also animals with sufficient body mass (anything of a size equal to or greater than that of a large dog). 

Since everyone reanimates after death, it seems like the zombie virus can never be extinguished. Most people are afraid of crowds, afraid of their neighbors, and even afraid of pets.  As a result of this fear, their society is highly, almost obsessively, regulated. Most people live in high security communities, clean blood tests are constantly required when going anywhere, and the idea of burying the dead instead of burning the infectious corpse is regarded with horror.  The threat of zombies is actually pretty blatantly conflated with terrorism, making this a pretty heavy-handed reference to living in a modern-day culture of fear.  I don’t think that Grant ever stepped over the line into sermonizing, though, and she didn’t attempt to force any solutions.  Their fear is certainly shown as reasonable, and the open question is how much they should let it govern their lives.

My Rating: 5/5

Feed ranks among the best of the books I’ve read this year.  I can literally say that it made me laugh and cry, and there was never a point where I was less than intensely interested in the story.  I could tell that a lot of thought went into the construction of the zombie virus and the post-zombie-apocalypse society, and I loved reading the descriptions of both. I found the public personae and private personalities of George, Shaun, and Buffy intriguing, and I quickly found myself deeply emotionally invested in their dangerous adventure.  I think Feed definitely deserves its Hugo recognition, and I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Deadline, which has just come out!