SciFiMike Book Reviews

SciFiMike Quick Review: Cryptonomicon

16/5/2018

cryptonomicon cover

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

This doorstop of a novel (906 pages in my edition) is split into two timelines — one set during WW2 (following Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, an American cryptanalyst, working with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park and other venues to break German and Japanese codes) and one set in the present (following Randy Lawrence Waterhouse, a descendent of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a computer expert working to set up an unhackable ‘data haven’ on the fictional island of Kinakuta).

The WW2 storyline also follows Bobby Shaftoe, a US Marine, seconded to work for a secret unit, trying to hide the fact that the German and Japanese codes have been broken, and Goto Dengo, a Japanese military engineer, tasked with building a hiding place for Japanese and Nazi gold in the Philippines.

Many other characters, both fictional and historical are also included in the intertwined storylines, with descendants of the WW2 characters crossing each other’s paths and working together.

The basic plot consists of the WW2 characters hunting for the hidden gold as a sideline to their normal duties, and the modern day characters stumbling upon the location of the hoard whilst setting up their telecoms business in the far east.

Despite being nominated for both the Hugo Award and Arthur C. Clarke Award, and winning the Locus Award for best science fiction novel, the story contains next to no SF elements. Just about the only plot points which could make the novel SFnal are the fictional islands of Kinakuta and Qwghlm, and the fictional programming language Finux, all of which could suggest that the story is set in an alternate world.

Of the two timelines, the WW2 one was much more interesting and entertaining than the modern day one. In fact, it could have been spun off as a stand alone novel in its own right and been worth reading. Unless you are really into computing and hacking, the modern day story was a bit of a snoozefest, to be honest.

The writing flowed smoothly enough and the character building was well done in the WW2 timeline, but not so much in the modern day one, where I found I didn’t really care about any of the characters.

Worth reading for the WW2 story alone, and if you are a computer geek or into cryptology, then you get an extra story thrown in for free.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Perfect Host — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 5

9/3/2018

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The Perfect Host — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 5

Volume five of ‘The Complete Stories’ series covers 1947-1949, before Sturgeon took a break from writing short stories to concentrate on his job at Time Inc. and work on television scripts.

In this volume we have:

Quietly

A young girl, raised in isolation by her recluse father, is sent out into the world to test her self-reliance and character.

This previously unpublished and unfinished story is thought to be the start of an uncompleted novel. Some of the plot points and themes are reflected in Sturgeon’s later novel ‘More Than Human’.

The Music

A hospitalised musician watches a cat kill a rat and muses on his music whilst taking a smoking break. It is unclear if the man is a normal hospital patient, a dangerous mental patient, or possibly even a vampire — the ending is ambiguous.

A very short, unsold story aimed at the literary magazines. Later included in Sturgeon’s collection ‘E Pluribus Unicorn’.

Unite And Conquer

A cold war world on the brink of conflict must unite to fight a common enemy when three unknown spacecraft appear and threaten Earth. But does the scientist tasked with producing weapons to fight the threat know more of the enemy than he is letting on?

The Love of Heaven

A man meets a strange, ethereal alien in the woods. The alien explains that his race evolved on Earth before humans and left for another planet, but the plant life on the new planet is slowly poisoning them. They hope to return to Earth, but it appears that they are now poisonous to all Earth life.

Till Death Do Us Join

A woman falls in love with two brothers who look strangely alike, but have two utterly different personalities.

The Perfect Host

A tale of suicide, murder and disappearing bodies told from multiple viewpoints, including that of an incorporeal energy being and Sturgeon himself. Even the reader is addressed directly at the end of the story. First published in Weird Tales, this story illustrates how Sturgeon showed that more complex and interesting ways of storytelling were possible in the pulp magazines.

The Martian And The Moron

A radio ham tries to pick up signals from Mars. Years later, his son’s rather vacuous girlfriend has her mind hijacked by Martians, trying to make telepathic contact.

Die, Maestro, Die!

A member of a jazz band murders the bandleader, but he is tormented by the the idea that his victim still lives on through the band’s musical style. He becomes obsessed with finding out which other musician is giving the band the leader’s style and removing his influence forever.

The Dark Goddess

A dying woman tells why she never married her partner, despite everyone believing they were married, before revealing a secret held by a statuette of The Dark Goddess.

An unpublished story which Sturgeon submitted to a competition in Cosmopolitan magazine (he didn’t win).

Scars

A western story, in which a pair of taciturn cowboys discuss how one of them saved the life of a lone female homesteader, and why he didn’t take advantage of her loneliness, but remained a gentleman.

Messenger

A man plots to murder his prospective father-in-law, by a convoluted method involving mercury vapour in a power station, when he learns that he is giving away his fortune to charity.

Minority Report

A narrator from a far future Earth, where humans have evolved into a peaceful, non-technological, enlightened society, tells the story of humanity’s first two interstellar journeys, and why they abandoned space travel thereafter.

Prodigy

Following the Fourth War, children are raised in state crèches, where any deviations from The Norm, due to mutations, are killed, unless the mutation is beneficial. One four-year-old’s mental effect on those around him becomes too much to bear for his mother and his carers.

Farewell To Eden

Following an apocalyptic war on Earth, a plan to reboot humanity on a new planet does not go well, when the new Adam and Eve emerge from their spaceship to find a horde of savage, mutant blue aliens with tails charging at them. The aliens look suspiciously like mutated versions of a blue, humanoid couple with tails that the humans observed just before they left Earth, stepping out of a metallic structure, only to be ripped to pieces by a horde of savage, mutant humans.

One Foot And The Grave

A young couple both find that one of their feet has been transformed into a cloven hoof. They search a wood for Forbidden Valley, where stories tell of a buried supernatural being who may be able to help them.

What Dead Men Tell

A cinema projectionist undergoes an initiation test to determine if he is fit to join a group who have discovered a treatment which confers immortality on its users.

The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast

A creature from another dimension falls through a portal into our universe and proceeds to cause chaos on Earth. In its own universe, the creature becomes invisible when frightened and emits a pleasurable feeling emanation when happy. Unfortunately, in our universe the opposite occurs — when it is happy, it is invisible and its emanation causes humans to itch uncontrollably. The creature proceeds to multiply by parthenogenesis and forces mankind to flee from Earth.

Volume five gives us another set of eminently readable stories. The standouts are ‘A Perfect Host’, with its unusual technique; ‘Quietly’, which does not read like an unfinished story and seems to me to be eminently saleable; ‘Prodigy’, with a neat, twist ending, and ‘One Foot And The Grave’, which improved as it went along, despite a tad too much “As you know, Bob…” exposition near the beginning. The rest of the stories are a mixture of typical pulp magazine tales, a quite decent western, an unsuccessful literary story and the humorous and much-anthologised Hurkle tale.

Not the best volume in the series so far, but still recommended as a decent Sturgeon collection.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Rediscovery of Man

21/2/2018

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The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith

Originally published as ‘The Best of Cordwainer Smith’ in 1975, this collection consists of twelve stories set in the author’s Instrumentality of Mankind universe. The contents follow the internal chronology of the Instrumentality, giving the reader an overview of the history and development of the society in which the stories are set — a society which is ruled by the hereditary Lords of the Instrumentality, who live for hundreds of years, thanks to the drug ‘stroon’, and where the human population is stagnating in enforced happiness, while the menial work of society is carried out by genetically uplifted animals known as ‘underpeople’.

Beginning with the first published Instrumentality story ‘Scanners Live In Vain’, we find a universe where space travel is only possible using cryonic suspension and spaceships are crewed by ‘Habermans’ — an underclass who have had all their senses except sight surgically eliminated, along with their personalities, in order to protect them from ‘the pain of space’, which would otherwise kill them or send them mad. The Habermans have their metabolism monitored and regulated by ‘scanners’ — volunteers who have also undergone the Haberman process, but retain their personalities — in order to make space travel possible.

When the scanners hear that a way has been found to block ‘the pain of space’ and travel without using Habermans, they decide to assassinate the inventor of the new way of travel, in order to protect their monopoly position in controlling spaceflight, but one scanner rebels and attempts to save the inventor.

The second story ‘The Lady Who Sailed The Soul’ is set a few years after the events of Scanners Live In Vain, and tells of an interstellar romance between a young woman, who wishes to become the pilot of a solar sail powered spaceship, and the older pilot of such a ship, who has returned to Earth from a colony planet after a forty year journey.

Moving on a few thousand years, ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’ finds human travel in outer space threatened by strange creatures known as the Dragons. Imperceptible to ordinary people, Dragons are experienced as nothing but a sudden death or insanity. Dragons can only be destroyed by very strong light, but they move too fast for conventional defence methods. Telepathic humans and telepathic cats (who perceive the dragons as rats) are able to sense the creatures within milliseconds. The humans and cats work together as teams to protect interstellar spaceships traveling via ‘planoforming’ (a type of faster than light travel). The cats ride outside of the spaceships in their own tiny crafts, waiting for the order from their human partner to attack. Pin-sets (telepathic amplifiers) heighten a telepath’s senses and allow the humans to communicate with their partner cats. The cats then destroy the Dragons with ‘pinlights’, miniature nuclear bombs whose blast gives off pure visible radiance that can destroy the dragons. Thanks to the combination of the human mind and the cats' quick reactions, space travel is an acceptable risk.

In ‘The Burning of The Brain’, a spaceship captain becomes lost in space when his navigation board, to which he is mentally linked, is found to have been set up incorrectly. He must allow the ship’s telepaths to probe his brain to find a memory of a route home, but the process burns out his brain and leaves him mentally disabled.

Around four thousand years later in the Instrumentality timeline, we get ‘The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal’. Sent on a mission of exploration, the Commander discovers a deep space probe which tells a story about the plight of a group of settlers calling themselves the Arachosians, who have succumbed to a plague that renders femininity carcinogenic. They were only able to protect themselves from extinction by genetically making everyone male and developing a process to allow males to give birth. Generations later, the lack of females has led to the Arachosians regarding normal humans as abominations, who must be destroyed. They therefore sent out the probes, asking for help, to try to lure passing humans to their death.

Suzdal travels to Arachosia and awakes from cryo-sleep to find the Arachosians trying to break into his ship to kill him, or capture him to reveal the location of Earth. He uses an emergency device intended to send his large spacecraft back a few seconds in time to instead hurl feline genetic material (coded to evolve for intelligence and to obey Suzdal) millions of years back on the far side of the local moon. A race of advanced, space-faring cat-descendants appears instantaneously and hail Suzdal as their god and creator. They engage the Arachosians at his order, allowing him to escape.

Despite saving the ship and successfully concealing Earth's location from the Arachosians, Suzdal is stripped of rank and sentenced to the prison planet Shayol for his misuse of the time device.

In ‘Golden The Ship Was — Oh! Oh! Oh!’, the Instrumentality defeat a planned conquest of Earth by the dictator Raumsog using a fake superweapon — a space battle cruiser ninety million miles long — which is mostly made of foam. Whilst Raumsog is pre-occupied with the superweapon, a small stealth craft seeds the dictator’s planet with deadly diseases which wipe out the population.

Moving on a further thousand years, ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’ is set on the planet Fomalhaut III, and is loosely based on the story of Joan of Arc. A therapist named Elaine becomes involved with a group of fugitive underpeople, living in a maze of drab service corridors jokingly dubbed ‘Clown Town’, who are being helped by Lady Panc Ashash (a computerised personality recording of a deceased Lady of the Instrumentality) and a telepath called The Hunter. Panc Ashash had predicted Elaine's coming, and how she would help the dog-girl D'joan create history by beginning a peaceful revolution calling for rights for the underpeople.

With help from Elaine and the Hunter, D'joan leads the fugitives from their hiding place in a march into the city. The underpeople go knowingly to their deaths professing their love and asserting that they too are people to the humans they meet along the way. Soldiers eventually arrive and end the revolution by killing all the underpeople, with the sole exception of D'joan. One of the Ladies of the Instrumentally on the scene chooses to put D'joan on trial — a remarkable occurrence, since underpeople did not have any such right. D'joan is sentenced to be burned to death.

The martyrdom of D'joan and the underpeople affect the human participants and witnesses in powerful, unanticipated ways. The lasting consequences eventually lead to the rebirth of religion, rights for the underpeople, and the Rediscovery of Man.

A thousand years later, ‘Under Old Earth’ tells the story of Sto Odin, a Lord of the Instrumentality, and his two robot servants, who are imprinted with the minds of dead men. They journey deep underground in search of the Gebiet: an underground city without the monotonous, enforced happiness of the surface world, where the laws of the Instrumentality are suspended and anything goes.

After a further thousand years, in ‘Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons’ a thief attempts to steal the life-extending drug ‘stroon’ from the planet Norstrilia, but first he must get past the planetary defences — Mother Hitton and her littul kittons.

In ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ we finally get to the beginnings of the Rediscovery of Man — a sudden radical shift from a controlling, benevolent, but sterile society, to one with individuality, danger and excitement.

The Instrumentality government, which in its overprotectiveness has driven the purpose from human existence, decides to turn back the clock to a less sheltered historical human era of 14,000 years before (i.e. our time). Virginia and Paul decide to undergo mental treatment to become French, but Virginia begins to have qualms about the artificial aspects of the personality she's been given, and wonders whether her love for Paul is real or synthesised. They decide to visit a computer, the Abba-dingo, never understood by the Instrumentality, which has reached the status of a god, able to foretell the future. It can only be reached walking a ruined processional highway leading into the clouds: Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.

The computer tells Paul he will only love Virginia for a few more minutes, and the prediction is fulfilled when Virginia falls to her death from the Boulevard during a sudden storm. Paul is rescued from the storm by a cat-woman, C’mell, and awakens at home to find himself being attended by a medical robot. Before C'mell returns to check on him, Paul ponders the nature of the machine that could make such accurate predictions, and grieves for his loss.

C’mell returns in ‘The Ballad of Lost C’mell’, where Lord of the Instrumentality Jestocost helps the leader of the underpeople, an eagle-derived underperson known as E'telekeli, steal information from the Instrumentality database with the help of a telepathic link via C’mell’s mind.

C’mell falls in love with Jestocost, but he has suppressed his own feelings as a distraction, and they separate when the plan succeeds. On his deathbed, many years after C'mell has died of old age, Jestocost has a brief telepathic conversation, apparently with E'telekeli's successor, in which he learns that she never loved anyone but him. The telepathic underperson assures Jestocost that his name will be linked with C'mell's forever in history and folklore.

Finally, in ‘A Planet Named Shayol’, a man convicted of crimes against the Empire (an autonomous region of the Instrumentality) is sent for punishment on the planet Shayol, where creatures called dromozoans infect the convicts and cause them to grow new body parts. The body parts are harvested and used in medical procedures by the Instrumentality.

Four children, heirs to the throne of the Empire, are sent to the planet to prevent them committing treason when they grew up. The underperson in charge is horrified and rebels, contacting the Instrumentality, who are unaware of the Empire’s cruelty. The Instrumentality despatch ships containing robots to rescue the convicts.

The stories in this collection are deservedly part of the SF Masterworks series. The Instrumentality is one of SF’s greatest future histories, along with Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, the Dune universe et al. Smith’s writing has a lyrical quality about it that raises it above the average for it’s time, and it is a tragedy the author died so prematurely at the age of 53, when there were so many more stories which could be told in his fascinating universe.

Very highly recommended.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Martian

7/2/2018

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The Martian by Andy Weir

Astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars following an accident during a dust storm, which forced the abandonment of his six-man mission, miraculously survives and must figure out a way to stay alive until he can be rescued. If you’ve seen the film of the book, you will know this involves lots of ‘pooh-tatoes’ and ’sciencing the shit’ out of everything.

The author gives us a really likeable character in Watney, with his sarcasm and humorous quips, and the reader will soon find themselves rooting for him when things inevitably go wrong (which they often do).

The supporting characters, though not as fleshed out as Watney, are believably written and do a good job of expanding the story from just Watney’s life on Mars to what’s going on back on Earth, and in space, where his crewmates are unaware of his survival.

Andy Weir has given us a real page-turner of a debut novel with The Martian, and you can fully understand why Hollywood came knocking.

Highly recommended.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: Thunder And Roses — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 4

27/1/2018

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Thunder And Roses — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 4

This fourth volume of ‘The Complete Stories’ series consists of stories written between 1946 and 1948, when Sturgeon had recovered from his writers’ block and regained his confidence as a writer following his competition win with ‘Bianca’s Hands’ in Argosy magazine.

The volume contains the following stories:

Maturity

A savant, suffering from infantilism, undergoes hormone treatment to give him a more mature personality. Fearing that loss of his child-like wonder at the world will stunt his creativity, the man suspends treatment. The resulting hormonal imbalance results in his mind maturing to a level never seen before in humanity, with tragic consequences.

Considered one of Sturgeon’s best and most critically acclaimed stories.

Tiny And The Monster

A lighthearted story of a metallurgist, whose dog appears to be able to read her mind and seems to be trying to tell her something.

The Sky Was Full of Ships

A cave is discovered containing an alien recording device, which has been recording the whole of human history since pre-historic times. The device begins transmitting its information to its creators when the first atomic bomb is used.

The story was adapted for radio in 1950 as an episode of Beyond Tomorrow under the title Incident at Switchpath.

Largo

A violinist, being exploited by his manager and obsessed with his manager’s wife, composes a musical masterpiece which he uses to get revenge.

Thunder and Roses

Following a devastating nuclear attack on the United States, with everyone in the Western hemisphere dead or dying of radiation sickness, a soldier must decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike at the enemy, which will sterilise the entire Earth, or hold off and allow humanity to survive.

It’s Not Syzygy

A man falls in love with his ideal woman and finds that he is also the man of her dreams.

The Blue Letter

A short, unpublished story about a man who receives a letter from his wife requesting a divorce, leading him to re-evaluate his relationship with his new girlfriend.

Wham Bop!

A drummer in a jazz band tries to sabotage his rival’s chance of being spotted by a big-time talent scout.

One of the few Sturgeon stories, other than his early work for newspaper syndication, not published in a science fiction magazine. This was published in Varsity, a magazine aimed at high school boys.

Well Spiced

Another of the few non-sf Sturgeon stories. This one was published in Zane Grey’s Western Magazine and follows a cook in a western frontier town who uses his culinary skill to expose a fraud in a neighbouring town, which is competing to become county seat and attract the railroad.

Hurricane Trio

A man is killed in a car crash with a parked flying saucer on a lonely country road. Restored to life by the aliens, with a new, improved mind and body, the man re-assesses his relationship with his wife and the woman he was contemplating leaving her for.

Written in a more literary style and originally with no SF content, this story was intended for sale to the ‘slick’ magazines, but it didn’t sell. The story was rewritten, with the SF element added, and sold to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine a few years later.

How Low

A failure visits a psychic to see what his future holds before deciding whether to kill himself.

Memory

A tale of industrial espionage, as a two-man family business must fend off a giant conglomerate determined to steal their idea of how to fit more plastic pipe into the limited space in a cargo spacecraft’s hold.

There Is No Defence

Following an interplanetary war between Earth, Mars and Jupiter, a fragile peace holds, overseen by The Joint Solar Military Council. When an unknown, invincible spaceship enters the Solar System and begins a series of devastating attacks on colonies and bases, the Council must decide whether to use the ultimate weapon — The Death. But first, they have to persuade the pacifist delegate to the Council to agree, as a unanimous decision is required. And why is the Jovian delegate abstaining from voting?

The Professor’s Teddy Bear

A monster, disguised as a child’s teddy bear, manipulates the mind of a child such that he has waking dreams of his future self. The monster then feeds on the knowledge provided by the child’s adult self in the dream.

A Way Home

A boy decides to run away from home, and imagines various scenarios for his future life and how he would return home as an adult.

All together, another well worthwhile collection of Sturgeon stories. The quality of the author’s writing is now consistently above average, as this volume shows with Hurricane Trio and A Way Home, both originally intended for the higher paying non-SF market, and Maturity, with it’s definite Flowers For Algernon vibe.

Highly recommended for anyone wanting an introduction to Sturgeon.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: Adventures In Time And Space

6/1/2018

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Adventures In Time And Space edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas

First published in 1946, this anthology contains 33 stories and 2 fact articles, mainly taken from the pulp magazines of the 1930s and early 1940s. The majority of the content is from Astounding Science Fiction, with one story from Amazing Stories and one from Planet Stories, plus ‘Brain’ by S. Fowler Wright from his 1932 single author collection ‘The New Gods Lead’. The two fact articles are ‘V-2 — Rocket Cargo Ship’ by Willy Ley, looking at the history of the Nazi rocket program, and ‘Time-Travel Happens!’ by A. M. Phillips, examining the claims of Edwardian ladies Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, who are said to have experienced a time-slip to the year 1789, whilst visiting Versailles in 1901.

Edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas (who went on to become a founding editor, along with Anthony Boucher, of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) the book contains a well-above-average selection of stories for the time, including some classics which have stood the test of time and are still well known today.

The well-known stories in the book include ‘Requiem’ by Robert A. Heinlein, about an old man’s quest to fulfil his dream of visiting the Moon; A. E. Van Vogt’s first published sf story ’Black Destroyer’; ’Nightfall’ by Isaac Asimov, about a planet which only experiences darkness once every 2000 years; ‘Who Goes There’ by Astounding editor John W. Campbell Jr. (under his pseudonym Don A. Stewart), which went on to be adapted as the movie ‘The Thing’, about a shape-shifting alien found trapped in the arctic ice; ‘The Roads Must Roll’ by Robert A. Heinlein (winner of the 2016 Retro Hugo Award for best novelette of 1940), about a future labour dispute affecting the conveyor-belt-like road system; ‘The Weapons Shop’ by A. E. Van Vogt, about a mysterious inter-dimensional shop which pops up to help people who have been oppressed by capitalism or authoritarian society; ‘Farewell to the Master’ by Harry Bates, filmed as ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, but with a completely different story to the film, apart from the visitor’s name Klaatu and his robot Gnut (Gort in the film); and ‘By His Bootstraps’ by Robert A. Heinlein (under his pseudonym Anson MacDonald), about a man interacting with himself via a time portal.

Among the less well known stories, there isn’t really a clunker among them — all are above average and readable, and some deserve to be more well known, such as ‘Seeds of the Dusk’ by Raymond Z. Gallun, about alien spores which try to colonise Earth, and ‘The Star Mouse’ by Fredric Brown, a humorous tale of the first mouse in space, who returns with increased intelligence following an encounter with an asteroid.

Credited with bringing the best of pulp SF to a more general audience and voted ‘All-Time Best Book’ in the 1952 Astounding readers poll, beating A. E. Van Vogt’s ’Slan’ into second place, this anthology deserves a place on any SF reader’s shelf. Buy it now — you won’t be disappointed.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: Killdozer! — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 3

16/11/2017

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Killdozer! — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 3

This third volume of Complete Stories contains works written between 1941 and 1946, although Sturgeon was suffering from writers’ block during the war years and produced no work from mid ’41 to mid ’44. When he resumed writing, he came back with a bang, with one of his most successful stories Killdozer, about an incorporeal energy being who takes control of a bulldozer and goes on a killing spree. The story was adapted for a TV movie in 1974. This volume also includes the original ending for the story, which was changed for publication.

Following the success of Killdozer, it seems Sturgeon tried to cash in by writing a few more stories featuring bulldozers, such as Abreaction and Bulldozer Is A Noun, which are included in this volume, but none had the same success as the original.

Of the fifteen stories in this collection, the other tales worth mentioning are The Chromium Helmet, about a machine which implants false memories, The Hag Séleen, about creepy goings-on in a Louisiana swamp, and Mewhu’s Jet, which may be one of the earliest stories about a visit to earth by an alien child, in the same vein as Spielberg’s E.T. An unpublished alternate ending for the latter story is also included in this volume.

The collection includes four unpublished stories — Poor Yorick, Crossfire, Bulldozer Is A Noun, and August Sixth 1945 — as well as Noon Gun, which is published in book form for the first time.

All the stories are entertaining reads, excepting a couple of the unpublished stories (which may explain why they were unpublished), with Killdozer being the standout of the collection.

A worthwhile read for any Sturgeon fan, or anyone wanting an introduction to the author’s early work.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Road

20/10/2017

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A half-starved, unnamed man and his young son trek across a post-apocalyptic America in this bleak, short novel from Cormac McCarthy.

The story itself has a very thin plot, consisting of repeated stops to shelter under a tarpaulin from the terrible weather and eat tinned food, whilst hiding from thieves and cannibals. It is not a plot-driven story — it’s essentially a story of the relationship between a father, who knows he is dying, and his son, who he knows will have to fend for himself when he is gone, or die.

The blurbs in the front of the book from various sources acclaiming the book a masterpiece are a bit over the top — I found it to be a bog-standard, post-apocalyptic tale, with nothing special to make it stand out from the crowd.

The writing style was very off-putting. There is a dearth of punctuation — no quote marks around any of the dialog, very few commas (instead we get short, staccato sentences) and missing apostrophes in words such as don’t and can’t. There seems to be no reason for this in the story, it just seems to be literary pretentiousness. A good story-teller should prioritise the story over style, not pull the reader out of the story with unnecessary stylistic tricks, as is the case here.

The book is a quick read, and you will not have wasted your time if you decide to read it, but it is far from the masterpiece the critics claim, despite it winning the Pulitzer prize.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: Microcosmic God — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 2

9/10/2017

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Microcosmic God — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 2

This second volume in ‘The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon’ series covers work written in 1940 and 1941, and is a quantum leap in quality over the stories in the first volume. Sturgeon was now selling stories regularly to John Campbell for publication in Astounding and Unknown magazines, and had ceased writing the formulaic stories for newspaper syndication found in the first volume. All but two of the stories in this volume were published in Astounding and Unknown.

The highlight of the volume is the title story Microcosmic God, about a reclusive scientist who creates microscopic beings with accelerated evolution. The creatures’ technology soon overtakes that of humanity and the scientist becomes rich from exploiting their inventions, leading to jealousy and trouble from his banker.

All of the seventeen stories in this volume are readable and entertaining, with not a dud among them. A couple (Cargo and The Jumper) reflect the time they were written, being about refugees from the war in Europe and strange goings on in a prisoner of war camp, respectively. The Purple Light is also notable, as it is basically a re-write of a story from the first volume, with the location changed from a plane to a spaceship.

All in all a worthwhile collection of early Sturgeon works, in which any reader should find something to like.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: In Search of Wonder

11/9/2017

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In Search of Wonder by Damon Knight

‘In Search of Wonder’ is one of those books, along with the likes of Fred Pohl’s ‘The Way The Future Was’ and ‘Hell’s Cartographers’ by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, that all SF fans interested in the history of the genre are told are ‘Must Reads’. Not so much.

First published in 1956 by author, editor and renowned critic Damon Knight, this collection of his reviews and essays was a bit of a disappointment. As one of the first critics to apply the same standards of criticism to SF as to so-called ‘literary fiction’, I was expecting incisive and insightful examinations of the works covered, but most of the reviews in this volume just seem like bog-standard reviews that can be found in a hundred-and-one places today. Now, this may just be because I am used to reading modern reviews — at the time these reviews were written, they may have been mind-blowing stuff.

Each chapter begins with a few lines of introduction and then we are into the reviews or essays. I would have preferred to see some comment from the author, either before or after each review, explaining why that particular work had been selected and what we could learn from the review, but no… we just get the text of the reviews, and that’s it.

The book contains chapters on bad sf, classic sf, good sf, and half-bad sf, along with individual chapters for some of the big names, such as Heinlein, Sturgeon, Asimov, Bradbury and van Vogt. There are also separate chapters for anthologies, new writers (new at the time, anyway) and British authors. The third edition has also been expanded with chapters on the Milford and Clarion writers workshops, what is sf? and writing sf, along with a brief biographical section about the author when young.

All in all, not a waste of reading time (some of the barbed comments in some of the reviews are quite amusing), but not a ‘Must Read’ by any means.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Books Reviewed

A Quantum Murder by Peter F. Hamilton.

Adventures In Time And Space edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

Anthem by Ayn Rand.

Beowulf translated by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.

Eon by Greg Bear.

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Flux by Stephen Baxter.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Futuristic Violence And Fancy Suits by David Wong.

Gateways To Forever by Mike Ashley.

Golden Son by Pierce Brown.

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In Search of Wonder by Damon Knight.

Killdozer! — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 3 by Theodore Sturgeon.

Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny.

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald.

Microcosmic God — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 2 by Theodore Sturgeon.

Mindstar Rising by Peter F. Hamilton.

Morning Star by Pierce Brown.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.

Raft by Stephen Baxter.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown.

Ring by Stephen Baxter.

Sea-Horse In The Sky by Edmund Cooper.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton.

The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories by Angela Carter.

The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem.

The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton.

The Eighty Minute Hour by Brian Aldiss.

The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem.

The Game Is Altered by Mez Packer.

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey.

The Godmakers by Frank Herbert.

The God Stalker Chronicles by P. C. Hodgell.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King.

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley.

The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd.

The Martian by Andy Weir.

The Menace From Earth by Robert A. Heinlein.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe.

The Perfect Host — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 5 by Theodore Sturgeon.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks.

The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame edited by Robert Silverberg.

The Syndic by C. M. Kornbluth.

The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton.

The Time Machines by Mike Ashley.

The Ultimate Egoist — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 1 by Theodore Sturgeon.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley.

The Way The Future Was by Frederik Pohl.

Thunder And Roses — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 4 by Theodore Sturgeon.

Timelike Infinity by Stephen Baxter.

Transformations by Mike Ashley.

Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin.

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.

Whipping Star by Frank Herbert.

Wool by Hugh Howey.

Professional Reader