SciFiMike Book Reviews

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 ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Ultimate Egoist — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 1

17/8/2017

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

This is the first volume in a 13-part series which collects all Theodore Sturgeon’s fiction shorter than novel length, both published and unpublished. The stories are presented in chronological order of writing, and as such this volume contains Sturgeon’s earliest work, from his first published story ‘Heavy Insurance’ in 1938 to ‘Butyl and the Breather’ published in 1940.

The majority of the stories in this volume are very short, two or three page stories written for newspaper syndication. Most of them are instantly-forgettable, formulaic rubbish — a fact the author was well aware of — with the odd exception, such as ‘Heavy Insurance’ which has a neat, twist ending. The rest are mostly ‘boy meets girl’ stories, with quite a few set at sea, as Sturgeon was working as a merchant seaman at the time and was obviously following the advice to ‘write what you know’.

The six or seven longer stories in the volume, all but one sold to John W. Campbell for publication in either Astounding or Unknown magazines, are by far a step up in quality. They include the title story ‘The Ultimate Egoist’, in which a man with an enormous ego finds he can will objects out of existence; what is probably one of Sturgeon’s best and most well-known stories ‘It’, about a monster learning about life and death; and the creepy and unsettling ‘Bianca’s Hands’, which the author was sure would sell to Unknown, but was rejected and not published for another eight years until Sturgeon submitted it to a competition in the British Argosy magazine and it won.

If you have never read any Sturgeon and are looking for an introduction to his work, don’t start here or you will be severely disappointed. This is a collection for the completist only, for someone who intends to collect the entire series. All of the worthwhile stories in this volume can be found in other Sturgeon anthologies, which will give a better overview of the author’s talent.

There are story notes at the back of the book, where the editor Paul Williams gives the dates of writing and first publication of the stories, and comments on each one. He also includes extracts from Sturgeon’s correspondence relating to the stories. These notes would have been better placed at the end of each story, to prevent constant flipping backwards and forwards, especially considering how short most of the stories are — there was a lot of flipping!

Recommended for Sturgeon completists only.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: Luna: New Moon

1/8/2017

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Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

Dallas meets Game of Thrones on the Moon, with a little bit of The Godfather thrown in for good measure, just about sums up this first volume of a planned trilogy from Ian McDonald.

We follow the fortunes of the Corta family, one of five families who control business on the Moon, as they feud and intrigue with each other for control of the economy, all the while intermarrying with each other, usually to gain advantage rather than for love.

With a legal system where contract law reigns supreme, and where disputes can be settled via a legally approved knife fight, the Moon is no place for the weak, and the Cortas and McKenzies are soon at each other’s throats for control of the lucrative Helium 3 trade.

This is a book with a large cast of characters (so large in fact, that there is a list of characters and their relationships at the beginning) and as such, there is little scope for fully fleshed out character development. Adriana Corta, the matriarch of the Corta family, is the only character who gets more than the average attention paid to her back story. The book also includes a glossary at the back, which you will have to refer to frequently, as the five families of the story all originate from different parts of the world and frequently use words from Portuguese, Arabic, Korean and Yoruba, to name but a few.

The story is involving enough to keep your attention, but with such a large cast of characters to introduce, the book is more or less doomed to be all set up for the next volume, as proves to be the case — the story ends abruptly on a cliff-hanger, with the story nowhere near complete. Don’t bother starting this book if you are looking for a stand alone novel, or you will be sorely disappointed with the ending. If you are looking for a new series to start however, then there is enough in this book to bring you back for the second volume.

And if you do decide to read this book, don’t get the Gollancz first edition, as it is riddled with proof-reading errors. I wasn’t keeping count, but subjectively there seems to be around one error for every ten pages or so. The constant extra words or missing words, or the wrong word in a sentence really pulled me out of the story on a number of occasions, and is not something I would have expected from a company of Gollancz’s reputation. Hopefully the errors will be fixed in subsequent printings.

Recommended for fans of familial intrigue and series novels, not so much for stand-alone enthusiasts.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Way The Future Was

20/7/2017

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The Way The Future Was by Frederik Pohl

The late Fred Pohl was undoubtedly one of the most influential people in the world of science fiction. As an author, literary agent, editor, and even as a public speaker, he experienced the genre from all sides.

In this memoir, written in 1977, he looks back on his life in the genre, from his founding of the Futurians fan group in the late thirties (whose members included such SF luminaries as Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Judith Merril and Donald Wollheim), through his post-war career as a literary agent, to his time editing Galaxy and If magazines in the Sixties.

The author gives us insights into the semi-incestuous personal lives of the SF writers of the time — there seemed to be endless divorces and remarriages among them — and the struggle to make a living writing for the low-paying pulp magazines, as well as some fascinating facts about his own extraordinary life, such as how he came to edit not one but two pulp magazines at the tender age of nineteen, and how he once held a job as a horse-urine collector at racetracks, which he apparently quite enjoyed.

A section on the author’s war service is followed by his life as a literary agent which, despite representing the majority of SF writers at the time and supplying the bulk of the stories to the pulps, he managed to end in debt to the tune of thirty-thousand Dollars. This is followed by his time editing Galaxy and If magazines in the Sixties and his constant battle with the publisher to increase both the budget and publishing frequency of the magazines. Despite this battle, he succeeded in winning three Hugo Awards for If as best magazine between 1966 and 1968.

Following a period when his personal life took a downturn in the early Seventies, the book concludes with the author restating his love for the SF genre, and “…I will go on doing it as long as I live.” Unbeknownst to him at the time, this would turn out to be for another thirty-six years, during which he won a further two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, for his novels, Gateway and Man Plus, and for his fan-writing at his blog, The Way The Future Blogs.

This memoir is rightly considered to be one of the must-read books for those interested in SF history, and as such is highly recommended.

Oh, and a final fascinating fact from the book: Fred wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on the Emperor Tiberius — it’s still there in the online Britannica. Go look it up.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: Paladin of Souls

29/4/2017

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Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

This second novel in the ‘World of the Five Gods’ series is more of a follow up to the first, ‘The Curse of Chalion’, rather than a direct sequel. We follow the adventures of Dowager Royina Ista, a secondary character in the first novel, as she escapes the oppressive atmosphere of her home by embarking on a pilgrimage tour of Chalion. Captured by a Jokonan raiding party, Ista is rescued by Lord Arhys and taken to Castle Porifors, where she discovers the Gods have a plan for her, which involves saving the souls of demon-possessed nobles and fighting off a Jokonan invasion of Chalion. Not quite the restful pilgrimage journey she was expecting.

The author has produced another top quality fantasy novel in Paladin of Souls, a deserved winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for best novel in 2004/5. As in the first novel, the prose flows effortlessly, leading to a real page turner, with an engaging plot and entrancing, well-rounded characters. There is not really anything to fault in this novel — it is simply fantasy as it should be written. Highly recommended.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Curse of Chalion

9/4/2017

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The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Nobleman and ex-galley slave Lord Cazaril returns to his homeland of Chalion after escaping captivity and finds himself appointed secretary-tutor to Royesse Iselle, second in line to the throne, after her brother Teidez.

Facing an unwanted arranged marriage to the evil Lord Dondo, Iselle begs Cazaril to do something to stop the marriage, resulting in Cazaril performing death magic in order to kill Dondo. Unfortunately, the use of death magic also usually leads to the death of the user, as well as the target.

Miraculously surviving the magic, Cazaril finds himself possessed by the spirit of Dondo and a death demon, and finds he now possesses second sight, which allows him to see an aura around the members of the royal family — a manifestation of a curse placed upon them many years ago.

Cazaril must find a way to rid himself of his supernatural hangers-on, whilst also trying to find a way to lift the curse which is upon all the Chalion royal family and stop Dondo’s brother, the Chancellor of Chalion, from seizing power on the death of the current ruler.

This is a superb fantasy novel, the first in the World of the Five Gods series, from multiple award winning author Lois McMaster Bujold. The prose flows effortlessly and the worldbuilding just seems to seep into the reader’s mind by osmosis — as an example of ‘show don’t tell’, this novel is a masterclass. The characters are all well-rounded and believable, and Cazaril himself is a protagonist who is crying out for further adventures. The plot ticks along at just the right pace and holds the reader’s attention all the way to the end.

Highly recommended.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Futurological Congress

25/3/2017

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The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem

Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy returns to Earth after a long absence to attend the Futurological Congress, being held in a hotel in Costa Rica. Unfortunately for Tichy, a full scale revolution occurs during his visit, leading the government to deploy airborne and waterborne hallucinogenic drugs — ’benignimizers’ — to calm the insurgents. Taking refuge from the fighting in the sewer system under the hotel, Tichy experiences bizarre and surreal hallucinations, culminating in him being severely wounded by government soldiers, and he is subsequently frozen in liquid nitrogen to await treatment in the future.

Awakening from cryogenic suspension in the late twenty-first century, Tichy finds himself transplanted into a new body and living in a ‘chemocracy’, where every facet of life is facilitated by one drug or another. Books are read by swallowing a pill, and any mood you wish to experience can be instantly generated by taking the right pharmaceutical. All food and water is liberally infused with hundreds of different drugs.

Tichy takes an antidote to the pharmaceuticals and discovers that the entire world he is experiencing is nothing but an hallucination. Due to overpopulation and scarcity of resources, the whole world has been drugged to keep them compliant and docile — the population are living in poverty and eating gruel while they hallucinate they are enjoying a world of luxury.

Tichy discovers layer upon layer of hallucinations, until he returns to the sewer he was hiding in previously, not knowing whether he has returned to reality or if it is just another illusion.

Having recently read Lem’s collection of robot stories, The Cyberiad, I was struck by the similarity in style between the two books. Whilst not being told in fairy tale style, as is the case with The Cyberiad, this novel has the same inventive wordplay and surreal humour. In fact, the bizarre situations Tichy finds himself in far surpass anything in The Cyberiad. The translator has also done stirling work translating Lem’s invented pharmaceutical names into english, whilst keeping their meaning.

The story fell a bit flat in the second half, after Tichy was awakened from freezing. The Monty Python type humour of the first half seemed to diminish somewhat as the story took a serious turn in its examination of overpopulation and control of the masses. Lem also seemed to get carried away with his invented words in the second half — it became a bit tedious after a while. The story would have been improved by editing this obsessive wordplay down a bit.

Recommended for readers interested in linguistic tricks and fans of humorous, surreal literature.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Menace From Earth

18/3/2017

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The Menace From Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

This collection of short fiction by Robert A. Heinlein, first published in 1959, collects eight stories from various sf magazines of the forties and fifties. The stories are as follows:

‘The Year of The Jackpot’ — a statistician’s graphs of unrelated phenomena, from stock market prices and rainfall to people stripping in public, all point to a peak on the same date, and indicate that the whole world is in for a bad year. Unfortunately, there also seems to be something wrong with the Sun.

‘By His Bootstraps’ — probably one of Heinlein’s most well known stories, it tells of a man who interacts with multiple versions of himself by means of a time portal. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

‘Columbus Was A Dope’ — two barflies and a bartender debate space travel and exploration, with one patron contending that exploration is pointless and Columbus should have stayed at home. The location of the bar provides a neat twist ending.

‘The Menace From Earth’ — a teenage girl, living on the Moon, finds her love life under threat when a femme fatale arrives from Earth on vacation.

’Sky Lift’ — a spaceship pilot must undergo a long period of high-G acceleration on a mission to Pluto to deliver a cure to a plague ravaging a research station.

‘Goldfish Bowl’ — two scientists investigate two massive waterspouts which have appeared in the Pacific. During the investigation, they disappear and find themselves in a featureless prison, being kept as study specimens, or perhaps pets, by some unknown intelligence.

‘Project Nightmare’ — the Soviet Union has planted atom bombs in multiple US cities, primed to explode at the same time if the US does not surrender. A secret team of psi-enhanced people must use their telekinetic and clairvoyant abilities to prevent the bombs from exploding until they are found and disarmed.

‘Water Is For Washing’ — a man with a phobia of water finds himself fleeing for his life when an earthquake allows the Pacific to flood an area of California which is below sea level.

Despite the age of these stories, they all hold up reasonably well, with none being unreadable. You have to allow for the attitudes prevalent at the time of writing, especially with regard to the female characters, but even here, ‘The Menace From Earth’ gives us an unusually-strong-for-the-time female protagonist.

‘By His Bootstraps’ was an entertaining romp, despite the ending being obvious a mile off, and ‘Project Nightmare’ was a genuinely tense thriller.

All in all, a decent Heinlein collection. Nothing outstanding, but worth your time.

SciFiMike Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

SciFiMike Quick Review: The Fifth Head of Cerberus

9/3/2017

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The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

This novel is made up of three separate novellas, the title story originally published in Damon Knight’s Orbit 10 anthology in 1972, and the others written specifically for the novel.

Set on a two-planet system colonised by French settlers, the first story sees a prisoner relating the story of his childhood growing up in a brothel, run by his father, as he discovers he is really the latest in a string of clones, created by his father to investigate why his family never seems to progress further in society than he himself has. The brothel is visited by an anthropologist, Dr. Marsch, looking to investigate a theory that the original colonists of the planet were all killed by the shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants, who subsequently assumed the form of the humans so perfectly that they forgot they were shape-shifters and now believe themselves to be human.

The second tale tells of the coming of age of an aboriginal boy, before the arrival of the Earth colonists, and the conflict between the hill-dwelling aboriginals, the marsh-dwelling natives and the mysterious shadow children.

The third story sees Dr Marsch imprisoned as a suspected spy, where he writes a journal telling of his expedition into the hill country looking to contact any surviving aboriginals, visiting the locations mentioned in the second novella.

The novel is not an easy read and can be confusing at times, but can be considered to be a novel essentially about identity — the protagonist of the first story discovers he is cloned, the boy in the second story goes on an aboriginal walkabout-style ritual to discover what it is to be a man, and Dr. Marsch tries to discover if he and the rest of the planet’s inhabitants are really aliens, or if the aboriginals still exist.

Gene Wolfe is often cited by other authors as one of the best writers of the science fiction field, and quite rightly so, but this is not one of his best works (it was, after all, only his second novel). The flow of the story was regularly interrupted by long parenthetical comments — by the time I had finished reading them, I had forgotten what the original sentence was about and had to go back and re-read the start of the sentence.

None of the characters are all that engaging or memorable and none of the stories are what you would call page-turners — this is a serious novel of ideas, not a pot-boiler.

Only recommended for fans of serious SF or Gene Wolfe completists.

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.

Baby Is Three — The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume 6 by Theodore Sturgeon.

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.

John Dies At The End by David Wong.

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.