This years Hugo Awards finalists and winners have been announced, and as I'm always looking for new authors with stories worth my reading time, I ordered a random selection of them as used books. As I don't care much for the books as physical items, getting them used is fine - they will be read in the bathtub anyway.

Murder by Memory is ab interesting 100 page murder mistery novella, maybe in the "cozy" genre of crime fiction. The premise is that the ship detective of a star faring slow ship gets woken up because some backups were destroyed and somebody was murdered. They now have to find the murderer, the motive and also the mechanism.

The book is part one of a three part series. I think it was Charles Stross who wrote that it is basically impossible nowadays to sell a single book, you always have to sell them as a trilogy to a publisher. The other two books are already listed on Amazon but not yet published, or at least, not yet available as used books, so I will stay patient.

Some of the trappings of the story remind me of Altered Carbon, but the story is quite short and fast-paced, so it doesn't hurt too much. The book does not go too deep into the societal consequences of human backups. On the other hand, you would expect most people on a 1000-year voyage to be on board with backups and restoration, in contrast to the larger, and more layered society of Altered Carbon.

There are some things that don't feel sensical to me, but that may be because I think too much about society and money. The ship has a (backed up) population of 10.000 persons, but they seem to have money, huge interest rates and at least one large bank. While I understand that the conceit is to keep people exercising their skills until landfall on a new planet, I don't understand how the interest rates could work like they do in the story. As a mostly stagnant population, I wonder where the need for that much capital and loans goes into, with no economy to grow. But most likely, I'll attribute this criticism to my view of the small population.

Story wise, the book could be double the size, as it has some traces of a longer noir story that aren't followed up on. Maybe it started out as a longer story and was then trimmed back for publication instead of trying to bring it to an Altered Carbon style lobger story. There could be one or two more plot twists to stretch out the story and my instincts led me to suspect deeper machinations to the murder. But the story works as-is , and better a published story that is short than an unpublished story that does not go anywhere, or is too similar to comparable setups like Altered Carbon or Glasshouse .

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The novel satirizes a (badly written) science fiction TV show. Over time, the protagonist and some others become aware that they are they are within that TV show, and that they must avoid The Narrative. The Narrative is most prevalent around the bridge personnel of the spaceship. Unfortunately for the protagonist and their team, the bridge crew members carry plot armor, a luxury not awarded to normal crew.

The novel is an amusing read, with a fun premise and good follow-through. I also liked the coda where the situation is looked at from the perspective of the (bad) TV show writer and other people in the story.

Tags: review book

Slow Gods (Claire North)

Quite good and entertaining. A space opera that follows a being that cannot be killed from a society of libertarian hyper-capitalism through other societies. The corporate-run society is shown quite imaginatively, with the protagonist trapped in its value system.

Some Desperate Glory

I really disliked the protagonist, so props to the author for writing some really unlikeable, trapped protagonist. Content-wise, the story follows the protagonist from a fascist rebel cell through several timelines until they find a timeline that they are happy with.

The book is actually very good, I finished it despite disliking the protagonist on every page in the first act.

The afterword lists interesting (non-fiction) book references the author used. Very interesting, ranging from how Fascism works, over how Scientology works, to the North Korean internal structure.

Steel Beach (John Varley)

John Varley died this year and I read some recommendations of his books. The most memorable quote about John Varley is by Isaac Asimov:

Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'" And that was John Varley's moment.

Steel Beach is set on a colonized moon after the destruction of the earth. It follows a reporter that is tasked by the de-facto ruling moon AI with finding out why the AI and the reporter are suicidal.

The book is quite entertaining and wittily written.

Press Enter (John Varley)

A quite interesting throwback to 1984 and the computers back then. The novella is about an investigation into a mysterious killing of what turns out to be a computer hacker.

The names of the persons are names of (then current) home computers. Otherwise, the novella isn't all that remarkable in retrospect but for 1984, it was quite prophetic.

Hawksbilll Station (???)

On the flip side of the "Press Enter" book, there was another short story of a prison set back in the Cambrian where political dissidents (and mostly, economists) get exiled to. Not really remarkable.

Starter Villain (John Scalzi)

Not as much science fiction. The novella revolves around a substitute teacher suddenly becoming head of a shadowy worldwide enterprise that provides services to governments that would otherwise be featured in James Bond movies. He and his intelligent cats need to outmaneuver rockets, dolphin unions and hired killers.

Entertaining as most of the John Scalzi books are.

Tags: review book