The whole idea of holistic detecting works against any conventional idea of plot. After all, if everything is connected, if the universe really is a mass of tangled coincidences, then order and reason doesn't matter at all. But hey, it doesn't matter as long as it's funny.

And it mostly is funny. Adams has a beautiful way of describing the friction of England: the impossibility of getting a pizza to go or a packet of cigarettes, mono-maniacal psychiatrists, traffic in London, hygiene chicken over a refrigerator. He also has an eye for the absurd. Dirk Gently's arrival at the murder scene of his former client, with a severed head on a turn table, is quite moving (don't pick it up, don't pick it up, don't pick it up). Likewise, the whole sequence with him getting attacked in his apartment by an eagle is also hilarious.

But the overall plot, about Norse gods, conflict between Odin and Thor, corporate types signing contracts for divine power, and so on, just sort of sit there. It's funny, but not that funny.

Ancillary Justice is a stately deconstruction of milSF tropes, a novel that ponders questions of identity, justice, power, and legitimacy, a thrilling tale of revenge, an investigation of profoundly alien minds and political systems. The linguistic cleverness, of a society that does not mark gender at all and refers to everyone as "her", conceals an excellent work of science fiction.

The story follows parallel tracks separated by nineteen years. In one, the Radch starship Justice of Toren orbits a recently annexed planet, keeping the peace in the city of Ors with a squad of ancillaries commanded by her favored Lieutenant Awn. Ancillaries are human bodies, brainwashed and linked into the ship's AI, armored with impenetrable silver forcefields. Awn and Toren navigate local tensions over the annexation, which of the local elites will come out on top, where Awn is to go in life, and a mysterious plot to foment some kind of armed uprising, hopeless as it is.

In the later story, a lone ancillary once part of Toren and now going by the name Breq searches the icy planet Nilt for a weapon. Breq drags along Seivarden, a thousand years ago an officer on Toren, who lost her ship and and was stranded in time by the cryogenic suspension of a lifepod. Now a drug addicted derelict, Seivarden is one frail tie to Breq's true identity as she seeks her revenge.

The mystery which links the two stories is how Toren became Breq, and why she needs that weapon. As it's revealed about halfway through, the plot to create an armed uprising in Ors was started by Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch. The emperor of human space is a millennia old clan of clones, linked by the same technologies that bind ancillaries into squads, and she has been of two minds for quite some time. Different factions of Anaander Mianaai vying for supremacy set secret accesses through the fleet, and one of her orders a massacre in Ors, murders Lieutenant Awn, and destroys all of Toren but for one ancillary. Breq seeks revenge, for her dead lieutenant, for the rest of her mind, for the endless crimes of annexation and turning humans into ancillaries. The action explodes when Breq confronts Anaander Mianaai with the truth, forcing the civil war out into the open.

I really enjoyed the exploration of the psychology of Toren, a ship with a thousand pairs of hands and a fondness for choral music, and the diminished singularity of Breq. The comparisons between the ship, made of humans but very non-human, and the Lord of the Radch, are delightful.

However, I couldn't say the same thing for the society of the Radch. They're a subtle and ritualistic culture, a grounding of universal human rights balanced against their aristocratic houses and policy of expansion. I enjoyed the gods and concerns with clientage, which seemed rich and original in a way that space opera rarely is, but beyond that little made sense. The Radch seems to have been technologically stagnant for centuries, the dominant human power, yet utterly helpless in the face of the alien Presgar, who disassemble Radch ships like toys. The Radch citizens make offerings at their temples, drink tea, and snub each other with elaborate displays of discourtesy and suppressed emotion, yet I kept wondering what all these people actually do.

And of course, the linguistics. Leckie attracted quite a bit of attention for her choice of female pronouns throughout. (Though careful attention notes that Seivarden is biologically male). I'm not sure that this changes anything in the story, although it's interesting to try and envision the characters (they are, by the way, mostly dark skinned). This choice, more than anything else, cements the Radch as thoroughly alien. Every extant human society marks gender in some way.

The second, and more interesting linguistic quirk, is that the word referring to the empire, to citizen members of the empire, and to the concept of civilization itself, are all Radch, so nearly indistinguishable that saying "people from outside the Radch are civilized" requires dipping into second languages. This massive linguistic blindspot, more than lacking gender or being ruled by a post-human clone, characterizes the Radch, and the way that expansion and assimilation is central to their very nature. Leckie never lets us forget that empires are built on violence, that the foundations of the State are ultimately a crime against someone who was later buried as a "savage", "traitor", or "barbarian".

****
(Original from April 7, 2015)

Ancillary Justice is one of those postmodern deconstructions of milSF that have become popular recently. Our narrator is an ancillary, a human body linked into the collective mind of a military starship, agent of the semi-feudal Radch Empire. In the past, she was part of a unit pacifying a minor world. Now, she's the last one of her shipmind, tracking down an alien gun that is the only weapon that can harm Anaander Mianaai, ruler of human space. But she's weighed down by Sievarden, and old (human) Lieutenant woken up from deep cryosleep, and confusion about the basic identity of her target, for Anaander Mianaai is not all that she seems.

There's some fun world-building her, the formalistic shape of the Radch rendered in sumi-e strokes. Ancillaries are both less than and more than human, the currents of politics are still but run deep, gender unmarked in civilization and constantly misunderstood by the narrator. The plot builds to dizzying byzantine confusion. I'm not sure that Ancillary Justice is as brilliant as everybody says it is, but you should probably read it, if only to know what everybody else it talking about.

We all know the story of the Odyssey: Cyclops, Circe, Calaypso, ten years lost at sea among the mythic horrors of ancient Greece only to return home to a palace full of useless nobles trying to seduce your wife. What I didn't realize was how small the classical tale was. It seems most of the book is descriptions of Greek hospitality, of guest-rights and gifts, of repeated complaints of the suitors, and elaborately plotted revenge.

For what it's worth, Fagles is probably the best translation, one which manages to full capture the barbaric glory of the epic. The front material, on the improvisational tradition of bardic poetry, and the historiographer debates over the Odyssey, are well worth the reader's time.

I took a year's break between Lost Fleet #4 and #5, and maybe it's just the lag, but Relentless is the first book in the series that feels pro-forma. Geary is just a few jumps from home, but the powerful Syndicate Reserve Fleet stands between him and safety, and the fleet is desperately short of everything.

There's more sabotage in the fleet, a kind of stasis in the cold war between Geary's most trusted confidants Rione and Captain Desjani, and a thrilling space marine rescue of a prisoner of war camp. That said, the fleet actions are repeats. I think Campbell could've done something interesting here, having the Syndics pound Geary with long range missiles that he is unable to respond to because of ammo shortages, which would've been a chance for more character development, but sadly it's more clashing vectors.

The book ends with their arrival home, and a great set up for the final book in the series.

Victorious closes out the Lost Fleet series with a satisfying win for everyone involved. Geary is finally back home, but the war isn't over. After a brief interview with the Alliance government to ensure he's not planning a coup, Geary and the fleet are sent back to Syndicate space to negotiate a peace treaty: status quo ante bellum, given that both sides battered themselves nearly to pieces for negligible gains.

The Syndics are truly desperate, throwing even the metaphorical kitchen sink at Geary. In classic style, he spots and outwits a ploy to turn the Syndicate home system into a immense trap using a hypernet gate bomb, dealing with three sided negotiations with the Syndicate government before blowing up the last hostile mobile force in human space.

The battle isn't over, because lacking the central authority of a fleet, the Syndics are splinting into successor states, and the enigma aliens on the far side of human space are making impossible demands. Geary takes the fleet into battle against an unknown foe, and makes a major breakthrough. The aliens are not noticeably superior to humanity: their vaunted impossibly good stealth technology is actual a virus installed in human's sensors. With this knowledge, Geary wins the first battle against the aliens, hopefully foreclosing that threat for now. And in the end, he gets to go home and put down the crown of command for a month, get married to Captain Tanya Desjani, and have a honeymoon.

So the series as a whole: They're definitely fast, light reads. Geary is a hero who manages to take common decency and skill and turn them into something extraordinary. There's some cool mysteries and action sequences, and a nod to realism in the space battles. However, a lot of stuff, both technical and in terms of characterization, is rather light and skimpy. Unlike some other milSF, Campbell knows how to write, knows that warcrimes are bad, and that democracy, while not perfect, is the best form of government we have. If you like space navy stuff, I definitely recommend this series.

*** SERIES SUMMARY REREAD ***

I read the first six Lost Fleet books while sick, and they really excelled when I could barely muster the energy to think in straight lines, let alone turn the page. These aren't complex stories, but they've got their heart in the right place, and they keep the pacing fast without getting bogged down into long description or infodumps. Sure, they're formulaic, with Geary crunching through obstacles with the power of honor and tactics, but it's a solid formula. Weirdly, I had zero memory of anything beyond book #2, but that just added to the reread pleasure.

Finding God is exactly what it says on the label, a well-organized survey of Jewish approaches to theological questions, particularly the nature of God and the problem of evil, from the Biblical era to modern thinkers. The authors are from the Reform tradition, and so this book is tilted more towards modern, humanistic, and heterodox thinkers, rather than getting deeply into any particular text or Rabbinic school. While limited by nature, and a little dated, this book is an excellent survey and introduction to 20th century Jewish theology.

The Three Body Problem is the first translated work to win the Hugo. Liu Cixin is a titan in Chinese science-fiction, having won 9 out of 27 Galaxy awards, the Chinese equivalent of the Hugo. Ken Liu's translation adds context for American readers. While the stilted style may be an artifact of translation, I think a lot of my disagreements with the novel are deeper and more structural.

The story presents two parallel timelines. In one, Ye Wenjie is a young astrophysicist in the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. She witnesses her mother denounce her father in front of a mob, her father murdered for the crime of teaching Einstein's theory of relativity. Ye is sent to Inner Mongolia in a construction battalion, where after being denounced for opposing clear cutting the ancient forests, she is saved by Yang, the head of a secret space warfare and radio astronomy facility. The traumatized Ye restores some balance to her life, but when a Chinese SETI broadcast receives a reply and warning from aliens, she makes a snap decision: Humanity's crimes mean that they do not deserve to rule Earth. The aliens need to invade and save us from ourselves.

Meanwhile, in the present (2007, but it still feels current) Wang Miao is a cutting edge nanotech researcher who is contacted by a strange international military organization that asks him to infiltrate a group called the Frontiers of Science, which may be connected to the suicide of several leading physicists. Through a virtual reality video game called 3body, Wang learns of the strange Trisolarian system, where a chaotic orbit around three suns creates incredibly harsh conditions for life. It turns out that the 3body game is a recruitment tool for the Earth-Trisolarian Organization, a group set up by Ye Wenjie and billionaire environmentalist Mike Evans to prepare to Earth for a very real Trisolarian interstellar invasion. Meanwhile, in order to ensure that the Earth will be vulnerable when the 0.1 lightspeed invasion fleet arrives, the Trisolarians have sent Sophonts, AIs inscribed in the hidden dimensions of protons, to scramble the results of scientific experiments and gaslight physicists. The book ends with Wang and the military aware that the invasion is coming, as the Sophonts mock humans as bugs, and humanity prepares to resist.

If there's one word to describe this book, it's overstuffed: First contact, human fifth columnists, evolution on a planet that orbits multiple suns, virtual reality, quantum AIs, the use of models in science, astrophysics... The Three-Body Problem is packed with dense infodumps. Unfortunately, this means that there's not really time to develop the implications of any of these ideas, which are just present as fait accomplai, or to round out any character aside from Ye Wenjie. Wang, for all the indications that he should be the protagonist, is particularly a blank slate. His partner, rogue cop Shi Qiang, is a bag of stereotypes, but is at least an amusing bag.

And for all the density of ideas in this book, Cixin misses out on the most interesting one. Are aliens just people in different bodies, or are they really aliens? What does it take to bridge cultures that don't share any evolutionary history. The Trisolarians grasp human culture very quickly, and come up with a very precise plan for how to destroy it. Their motives of "kill them and take their biosphere" seem, well, not very exotic for a space-faring species from a very strange planet.

The idea that sticks with me most out of The Three-Body Problem are the number of people who have simply given up on humanity: the environmentalists, scientists, philosophers, and artists in the Earth-Trisolarian Organization who have decided that humanity is worthless, and that the aliens can save us, all on the flimsiest of messages from space. There's a real darkness here about the integrity of self-proclaimed elites and prophets.

****
(original review from December 7, 2014)

I picked up the The Three Body Problem with very high expectations. Someone (tor.com, IEET?) advertised it as the first modern classic of Chinese science fiction. That may be true, but its not the strongest book. The story is fascinating, but painted in very broad, almost operatic strokes. Ye Wenije is a traumatized survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who winds up assigned to a top secret radio astronomy station. There she makes a discover-mankind is not along in the universe, and a decision-that we cannot take care of ourselves, and that an alien power will set Earth to rights. Her story is paralleled by a much less interesting contemporary investigation of the movement she founded to welcome the aliens, and the strange society that develops on a planet orbiting three suns (Alpha Centauri?)

First contact stories are a staple of science fiction, and the reaction that 'humanity doesn't deserve to survive' and the formation of a pro-alien 5th column are pretty standard responses. There's not enough fidelity or realism in the story to lift it above average. It's enjoyable enough for fiction in translation, but it's far from a must read, and I'll probably skip the sequels.

3:16 is an minimalist RPG, and one that glories in violence, pure and simple. You are soldiers of the glorious 16th Brigade of the 3rd Army, sent forth into space to preemptively defend Terra against alien threats by executing them with extreme prejudice. While it's neat and simple and fast to play, and is a lot of fun for one-shots, there's some wonky balancing in the long-term play. Promotion is based on how much you kill, and being promoted makes you better at killing, leading to a nasty spiral of escalation between characters. For a combat heavy game, there are almost no tactics: I don't need D&D 4e levels of microcrunch here, but the gameplay gets samey fast. The final twist (you go insane and turn back towards Earth to destroy it) is really cool, but I doubt anybody could play enough 3:16 to see it. And finally, the GM advice is kinda flat, giving you a list of planets and monsters when a way to generate combats and objectives would be more useful.

3:16 is a great one shot game, but could use a little more polish on the rules.

This is a novel with ambition, but underneath the gloss, I'm doubt there's anything there. Babylon Babies riffs on the usual cyberpunk tropes, mercenaries, mobsters, New Age cults, hackers and shamans, and it tries to transcend the genre by bringing in a bunch of abstruse theory, Deleuze and Guttari, Donna Harraway, Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart.

Instead of deepening the story, the philosophy about schizophrenia and the next evolutionary stage of mankind just overwhelms what could have been a tight, noirish cyberpunk thriller. In the incredibly fractured setting and plot, the inevitable betrayals and triple-crosses happen because they we all agree they're supposed to. Psyches break and go mad because the plot demands it, not because the characters have been pushed beyond their limits.

This novel consciously follows in the footsteps of Neuromancer. But while the novelty of its ideas at the time and the stark evocative force of Gibson's langauge made Neuromancer an instant classic, Babylon Babies just feels trite and forced.

In astronomy, a technique called Active Optics uses a dynamically warping mirror to counteract atmospheric disturbances and show clear pictures of the sky. In futurism, the same technique is owned by Bruce Sterling.

Futurity runs like a live wire through this collection. Bruce Sterling is a man trying to throw himself boldly into the future. These stories feature architects and bloggers crouching in the ruined cities of the American Midwest and Central Europe. Assassins and necromancers arrange their plots in scenic Turin and Tuscany. But there's not a lot of traditional fiction here, the well-crafted stories that you might remember from a "A Good Old Fashioned Future" are interspersed with screeds on design, governance, and sustainability, and a few of the stories take a stylized avante-garde approach to world-building that reminds me of Expressionist film. Sterling is like a man trying to build a glider as he plummets from a cliff, and there crude edges and open circuits everywhere. But the book is full of those sharp turns that Sterling specializes in, the sentence that takes some bullshit we all accept because that's the way it is, in turns it inside-out to show what's really going on.

This is a spiky, thorny book. The 12 pieces in here are nominally short fiction, or at least they don't describe the surface of our consensus reality and none of them are longer than 20 pages, but most of them aren't the kind science-fiction you'd see at a boring bookstore like B&N or the dearly departed Borders. Rather, like Bruce himself, it's an uneven mixture of Texan orneriness, California cyberdelia, and European design criticism. This is not a book for people who just want to be entertained, and it's not for people who want answers, but if you're looking to turn 2012 into a year of Transition and wind up on top at the end, this might be the book for you.