It would be tempting to say that Joe Spork lived a quiet, unremarkable life until he was pulled into an attempt to stop a mad South Asian dictator from unleashing a 1950s clockwork doomsday device by a retired octogenarian super-spy named Edie Banister. Tempting, but not quite accurate, since Joe is the son of the infamous Matthew “Tommy Gun” Spork, who kept fashionable crime and the honourable lifestyle of the gangster alive long after it should have faded into obscurity. Joe has turned his back on his father’s life of crime and taken up his grandfather’s trade—watchmaking—but it’s not enough to keep him from becoming involved in much larger, more bizarre affairs.

Angelmaker is a chimera of a novel. The core of the story is a spy thriller, with homages to the golden era of James Bond and daring international espionage on behalf of queen and country. It’s a race against time to prevent a megalomaniacal supervillain from destroying not just the world but life everywhere in the universe! Yet rather than playing it straight, Nick Harkaway injects that sort of dry, very British humour that isn’t afraid to verge upon—and venture into—the absurd. It’s why I loved The Gone-Away World, and it’s why I love Angelmaker. Harkaway writes with a voice that makes me laugh out loud, whether it’s at his descriptions, dialogue, or characterization.

Despite its careful callbacks to the 1920s gangster lifestyle and the 1950s Cold War spy genre, Angelmaker is very much a post-9/11 novel. The heightened response to domestic terrorism is a counterpoint to those more removed and romanticized elements. Various levels of civil service decide (and quite accurately, alas) that Joe Spork had something to do with the activation of this doomsday machine, and they aren’t afraid to subcontract someone to do a little enhanced interrogation. In this climate, Joe no longer has the right to remain silent—he has very few rights at all. It’s significant that Joe’s first encounter with an antagonist is not the dreaded Shem Shem Tsien but with Rodney Titwhistle and Arvin Cummerbund, who are not afraid to do whatever’s necessary to safeguard their country. This tension between Joe and certain representatives of government authority is what ultimately catapults the novel towards its climax and Joe’s transformation into a man of action.

See, the first part of Angelmaker is enjoyable, but in a slow and very reflective way. We meet Joe, learn about his connections to the London underworld, hear a good yarn about what it’s like to be initiated as an undertaker, and then we meet Edie. As rumblings of a doomsday scenario gather on the horizon, Joe sort of stumbles from scene to scene without too much of a plan in mind. Aside from his unwitting involvement in activating the doomsday device, he is more of a spectator in the consequences than a participant—that is, until the government decides to turn him into a wanted man.

Joe’s status as a fugitive forces him to confront a crisis of identity foreshadowed since the beginning of the book. He has spent the past decades of his adult life actively trying not to turn out like his father and avoiding, as much as possible, associations with the criminal element. His status as “the Crown Prince of the Night Market” nips at his heels like an unwanted insurance salesman, but Joe is determined to survive on the straight and narrow. Except it increasingly seems that, if Joe wants to get out of this alive—not to mention save the day and get the girl—he will have to step up and become not Joe Spork, the grandson of Daniel Spork, but Joe Spork, son of Matthew “Tommy Gun” Spork. This inevitable transformation is almost an apotheosis of its own, albeit not in quite as grand a way as Shem Shem Tsien would like for himself. From there, the novel switches gears and becomes a wild ride from “crazy” to “insane” as Joe and his allies concoct a crazy plan to save the world.

And the girl? Her name is Polly, or maybe Mary Angelica, a onetime childhood friend and sister to Joe’s lawyer, Mercer. (The firm Noblewhite & Cradle, with its suspiciously ultra-competent staff, is another highlight of this book. They can, in Mercer’s own words, “sue anything”.) Polly is awesome, because despite being a love interest in a book with a male protagonist, she’s her own woman. When Joe has the audacity to treat her like a sidekick, she sticks an oyster knife under his eye and retorts, “Can we be very clear … that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?” Later, after Joe has been kidnapped by the aforementioned team of Titwhistle & Cummerbund, Polly pays the latter a visit and clarifies her feelings about Joe:

I do not know, at this point, whether Joshua Joseph Spork is the man of my life. He could be. I have given it considerable thought. The jury is still out. The issue between you and me is that you wish to deprive me of the opportunity to find out. Joe Spork is not yours to give or to withhold from me, Mr. Cummerbund. He is mine, until I decide otherwise. You have caused him grief, sullied his name, and you have hurt him. If anyone is going to make him weep, or lie about him, or even do bad things to him, it is me.

From this and other comments and actions Polly makes, you get the sense that she might be a little bit mad. (Then again, maybe everyone in this book is.) Psychology aside, this is one woman I want on my side.

Finally, I can’t continue praising this book without talking about Edie, the common denominator throughout the rest of this plot. She knew Joe’s grandfather and grandmother. She is, in a sense, the last surviving member of a cabal who created this doomsday machine, which did not start out its life as a doomsday machine but, like all good inventions of mad scientists, has the capacity for mayhem as well as miracles. The Edie of the 1950s is a cocky, over-confident spy whose hubris almost gets her and others killed. The Edie of 2012 is … a cocky, over-confident retired spy whose hubris almost gets her and others killed. At over eighty years old, Edie deals with assassins sent to kill her by calling them amateurs and shooting two of them with a gun concealed in her underwear drawer. (She chastises the third one in her best old woman voice and then sends him packing to his mum in Doncaster.) Like Joe, Edie is this perfect combination of heroic awesomeness and flawed humanity. So even though Angelmaker has characters and events who are larger than life, we can still identify with the protagonists, because for all their skill they are still kind of just muddling through the whole mess.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it is one of the most original and unique books I’ve read in a long time. Lots of authors can ride the tides of traditional fantasy, urban fantasy, or science fiction and create vivid, imaginative stories. Harkaway, however, goes beyond that to create a story that really is different from anything else on offer right now. To label this as steampunk simply because of its clockwork components would be grossly mistaken. To call this a spy thriller simply because of its subplots of espionage and intrigue would be a massive oversight. And while, thanks to Harkaway’s style, this book is definitely comedic and entertaining, it also has an edge and a sense of constant, present danger—not to mention very real and permanent sacrifices from some.

In short, Angelmaker hits a sweet spot for me. Every moment spent reading was a moment I could bask in Harkaway’s sprawling scenery and characterization. The story is just scene after scene of slow but constant development toward total mayhem, with a diversity of characters along for the read. Many books are entertaining and many are moving; Angelmaker is both of these things, and it is also a supremely satisfying read.

I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone with an impromptu, 15-minute oration on the geopolitical situation in South Ossetia; and, everyone applauds and turns to go back to their own conversations, only for the guest to launch into another story about the time they parachuted into the Balkans to break up a nascent civil war, a story which is followed quickly by a similar tale of a visit to Southeast Asia…. Well, I think you catch my drift. Daniel Kahneman spins an interesting tale of human psychology and the way our brains interpret and act on data. But the book overstays its welcome by a few hundred pages.

Kahneman’s thesis breaks our decision-making systems into two pieces, System 1 and System 2, which are the respective “fast” and “slow” of the title. System 1 provides intuitive judgements based on stimulus we might not even be conscious of receiving; it’s the snap signals that we might not even know we are acting upon. System 2 is the more contemplative, cognitively taxing counterpart that we engage for serious mental exertion. Though often oppositional in the types of decisions they produce, Kahneman is keen to emphasize that it’s not about System 1 versus System 2. Instead, he’s out to educate us about how the interplay between these systems causes us to make decisions that aren’t always rational or sensible given the statistics and evidence at hand.

Kahneman takes us through an exhaustive tour of biases and fallacies people are prone to making. He talks about the halo effect, affection bias, confirmation bias, and even regression to the mean. As a mathematician, I liked his angle on probability and statistics; as a logician, I appreciated his brief segues into the logical aspects of our contradictory decision-making processes. Lest I give the impression Kahneman gets too technical, however, I should emphasize that, despite its length, Thinking, Fast and Slow remains aggressively accessible. There are a few points where, if you don’t have a basic grasp of probability (and if Kahneman demonstrates anything, it’s that most people don’t), then you might feel talked over (or maybe it’s those less-than-infrequent, casual mentions of “and later I won a Nobel Prize”). But this book isn’t so much about science as it is about people.

There are two other things I really appreciated about this book, both of which are related to psychology. I’m a fairly easygoing person, and I don’t always like to make waves, but sometimes I like to make some trouble and argue with some of my friends about whether psychology is a science. The problem for psychology is that it’s actually a rather broad term for a series of overlapping fields of investigation into human behaviour. On one end of this continuum, you have Freud and Jung and the various psychoanalysts who, let’s face it, are one step up from astrologers and palm-readers. On the other end, you have the cutting-edge cognitive psychology informed by the neuroscience of MRIs, split-brain studies, and rat research. So claiming that psychology is or isn’t a science is a little simplistic, and I’m willing to grant that there are areas within psychology that are science. For what it’s worth, Kahneman went a long way to reinforcing this: it’s clear he and his collaborators have done decades of extensive research. (Now, yes, it’s social science, but I won’t get into that particular snobbery today.)

The other thing I liked about Thinking, Fast and Slow is its failure to mention evolutionary psychology. Once in a while, Kahneman alludes to System 1’s behaviour being the result of evolutionary adaptation—and that’s fine, because it is true, almost tautologically so. But he never quite delves into speculation about why such behaviour evolved, and I appreciate this. There’s a difference between identifying something as an adaptation and determining why it’s an adaptation, and I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychologists’ attempts to reduce everything to the trauma of trading trees for bipedalism … I’m willing to admit I have an ape brain, but culture must count for something, hmm?

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that this book reaffirms my supercilious disregard for economics. According to Kahneman, stock brokers and investors have no idea what they are doing—and some of them know this, but most of them don’t. Economists are, for the most part, highly-trained, but they seem bent upon sustaining this theoretical fantasy land in which humans are rational creatures. Aristotle aside, the data seem to say it isn’t so. I occasionally try my hand at reading books about the economy, just so I can say I did, but they usually end up going over my head. I’m a mathematician and I don’t get numbers—but at least I’m not the only one.

So Thinking, Fast and Slow is genuinely interesting. I learned a lot from it. I would rate it higher, but I was starting to flag as I approached the finish line. Truth be told, I skipped the two articles Kahneman includes at the end that were the original publications about the theories he explains in the book. I’m sure they are fascinating for someone with more stamina, but at that point I just wanted to be done. That’s never good: one of the responsibilities of a non-fiction author is to know how to pace a book and keep its length appropriate. Too short and the book is unsatisfying—too long, and maybe it’s more so. And I think this flaw is entirely avoidable; it’s a result of Kahneman’s tendency to reiterate, to circle back around to the same discussions over and over again. He spends an entire chapter on prospect theory, then a few chapters later he’s telling us about its genesis all over again, just from a slightly different angle. Like that party guest, Kahneman is full of interesting stories, but after telling one after another for such a long period of time, it starts sounding like white noise. And he ate all those little cocktail snacks too.

I inevitably ended up comparing Thinking, Fast and Slow to How We Decide, a much slimmer volume along much the same lines as this one. Whereas Lehrer’s focus is on the neurology behind decision-making, Kahneman is more interested in the psychology. Both books boil down to: we suck at automatic decision-making when statistics are involved; therefore, we behave less rationally than we believe we do. Lehrer explains why things go wrong, and Kahneman categorizes all the different way things go wrong. In many ways the books are complementary, and if this is an area of interest for you, I’ll recommend them both. For the casual reader, however, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a rather dense meal. By all means, give it a try, but take it slow.

Thomas Hardy knows where it’s at. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is not only one of the best books I’ve read this year but one of the best books I’ve ever read. My previous outings with Hardy convinced me of his skill as a writer; this book cements him as truly deserving classic status. Hardy is one of those writers whose pointed social commentary dovetails precisely with his plot and characterization. He doesn’t have to sacrifice story for subtext, and it shows: Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a stunning novel, easy to read and follow but also emotionally moving; at the same time, it’s a sharp critique of late nineteenth-century English society, from the decline of rural life to the treatment of women.

I liked Bleak House, and in general, it’s obvious why Charles Dickens is a perenially popular, time-honoured writer. He has a keen wit and an uncanny knack for characterization. But he’s just so long-winded! Hardy, by contrast, has a clear and concise style. I don’t mean to hold up these two authors for comparison and declare Hardy superior—they both have their merits—but the act of reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles certainly felt smoother than Bleak House. (I’m not sure what it says about me that I found this book “easy to read” despite the numerous and almost unrelenting tragedies that befall Tess. I’m choosing to believe it’s because Hardy’s writing is just so good; it’s like watching a TV show that you don’t want to pause because you need to find out what’s happening next!)

If Dickens was the master of commenting on the urban side of the Industrial Revolution, then Hardy is his rural counterpart. In his fictional Wessex, life is hard for the common folk. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is rife with imagery and symbolism that depicts a society in decline, particularly the fact that the eponymous family, once noble, has now become diluted to the common Durbeyfields. Though the role of technology is quite different from the factories of London, its presence is nevertheless just as keenly felt: Hardy speaks of the effect new farming technology has on labour and employment. Whereas factories created jobs in the cities, farming equipment took jobs away. There’s a definite feeling of nostalgia here, with Hardy playing the role of the observer of the end of an era.

So it’s hard times, and when Tess’ father discovers their family hails from a proud Norman lineage, he tries to make the best of it. John Durbeyfield is an interesting patriarch: he strikes me as a man who lacks guile. As soon as he learns of his bloodline, he goes off to the pub and talks about it to everyone. He demands honours and respect as if it his due—there is no subtlety to John Durbeyfield. His wife Joan (oh, the names in this book) is quite the opposite: she schemes, albeit very openly, to use this information, however accurate, to their advantage. She sends Tess off to a distant relative who claims the name d’Urberville, hoping that rekindling an association will bring the Durbeyfields some good fortune for a change. But all it gets Tess is a baby and bad memories.

I really like this “Penguin Popular Classics” edition that I bought used for $3.95. It has a beautiful cover (not the one, at the time of this writing, associated with this book). And it has no introductions, forewords, afterwords, or “critical” interpretations or examinations of the text. While these can be useful—sometimes—I also find them distracting and often boring, because they tend to be an opportunity for some academic to wax about their favourite aspects of a classic. And I can see why they were useful a few decades ago when looking up critical essays required a trip to the library and a battle with the card catalogue. Now, however, I just have to Google “Thomas Hardy critical essay”, and I can have my pick of literary criticism.

So I like this edition, except there is one interesting detail that bears mention. The back of my book describes the story as “a simple but beautiful country girl’s seduction by another man…”. Only, I’m pretty sure Alec doesn’t seduce Tess; he rapes her. There is a vast difference. This choice of words in the book’s description irks me, and I wonder why the publisher chose to do it—did the marketing team genuinely decide it’s ambiguous, or was someone not a fan of the word “rape” showing up on the cover? The situation does not seem ambiguous to me. Hardy’s allusion to “Tess d’Urberville’s mailed ancestors” dealing “the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time” seems to make it clear that Alec is taking advantage of Tess’ situation—both her status and the fact that they are alone, at night, in a place unfamiliar to her. Furthermore, at no point in this book does Tess ever so much as hint that she feels anything other than repulsion and loathing for Alec. She sees through his transparent attempts to seduce her from the beginning, and she spurns his advances at every turn.

Tess laments that her mother should have warned her of what unscrupulous rogues men could be. And, yes, Joan did kind of throw her daughter into the wider world without much of a tutorial. This particularly smarts in light of the fact that Joan, rather than acting as a supportive ally, blames Tess for getting raped and then not even getting a marriage out of the deal. She is the one who initiates the scheme to ingratiate Tess with the other d’Urbervilles. But when Alec rapes Tess, Joan’s reaction is, “And you didn’t marry him? Disappoint!” She goes as far as to claim Tess would have learned to love him with time. It’s the ultimate in victim-blaming, and it’s coming from the one person one would expect to give Tess the support she needs. Joan continues to play the role of oft-times antagonist to Tess, throwing up obstacles to the possibility of happiness with Angel.

But, no, the only person who gives Tess the support she needs is Tess. She has the baby and falls in love with it, caring for it until its untimely death, and worrying about its immortal soul. (Tess maintains a somewhat ambivalent and unsophisticated relationship with religion throughout the book.) She works tirelessly, and even after the baby’s death, continues to look for work. I took a stroll through the 1-star reviews on Goodreads to see why some people hate this book. (It is amusing to see how many confused Hardy’s critique of Victorian morality for an endorsement of it.) Many cited Tess’ lack of agency or action as the reason. Fair enough—it’s OK not to like the book—but I don’t see it. Tess keeps going despite everything Hardy throws at her. Tess is a survivor and a strong character.

Most of Hardy’s characters are round and well-defined, and that’s what prevents Tess of the d’Urbervilles from being a flat and dull message novel. Not only does Tess change considerably, going from “innocent” maiden to unhappy wife to murderer, but Angel, Alec, and other minor characters change as well.

Angel is an interesting mirror to Tess: like her, he begins as a rather naïve individual. He has preconceptions about farming and colonial life that turn out to be far from the case; he has illusions about Tess and marriage that he finds difficult to reconcile once he has both. His initial reaction upon learning of Tess’ previous “relationship” is every bit as harsh and condemning as we would expect for dramatic purposes. But as their separation nears its first anniversary, Angel sees that he was wrong.

This change in his thinking is helped by some urging from two minor characters, Izz and Marian. Dairy maids at the farm where Tess meets Angel, they are head-over-heels for him as well—but they also recognize he has eyes only for Tess. The high school version of this novel would require them to form a pact to take Tess down and then fight to the death for Angel; instead, Hardy makes them more interesting. They all wish they could marry Angel, and his departure with Tess is hard on them … but at the same time, they find themselves unable to hate her. They consider her good, pure, and altogether quite a match for Angel. When Angel is on the cusp of bringing Izz to life with him in Brazil rather than his own wife, it’s what Izz says about Tess that makes him change his mind. Without these two characters, I wonder if Angel would have had the motivation to reconsider his judgement against Tess so thoroughly.

I find Alec’s characterization a little more problematic. His abrupt regression from converted preacher to rogue is fine, but afterwards he seems to act intermittently chastened and nonplussed by Tess’ rebuffs. I guess these changeable moods of his are supposed to show how beneath his more playful persona a darker, abusive personality lurks. Compared to Angel and Tess, however, Alec’s characterization is slightly more of the moustache-twirling bad guy variety. If there is anywhere the seams of Hardy’s careful plotting and narrative sleight-of-hand shows through, it’s here.

I don’t care, though. From a stylistic perspective, this is one of the best nineteenth-century novels I’ve read. The tension in the last half of the novel, when Tess throws her lot in with Alec just as Angel returns, leads up to an amazing and unforgettable climax. We knew (thanks to the back cover) that all these tragedies were leading up to a murder. I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that, as I was reading, I found myself thinking, “If only there were a way she could get away with it.” But she can’t, of course—Hardy won’t let her, because of that damned d’Urberville coach, and so she goes off to the gallows, and Angel marries ’Liza-Lu.

Then the curtain descends, the house lights come on, and the cast takes a bow. It’s time to process our feelings. There were two other common objections I noticed about Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The first is that it’s just too depressing, and so while it may have literary merit, it doesn’t deserve praise. I’ve already talked at length why, when done right, depressing is good. The second objection is that the book—particularly the way Tess doesn’t “stand up for herself” (to Angel, I assume?) is frustrating. And my response to that is: well, good.

The major sentiment I get from Hardy from reading this book is one of intense frustration, so if you’re frustrated with Tess or with Tess, then he’s doing something right. Hardy is frustrated. He’s frustrated by the decline he observes throughout the country heralded by the age of steam. He’s frustrated by the venal, self-serving motivations of manipulators like Joan and hedonistic heirs like Alec. He’s frustrated by the double standards that apply to women and sexuality, but more than that, he’s frustrated because people who otherwise proclaim themselves open-minded, progressive, and sceptical fallback on such attitudes without a second thought. My favourite passage from the entire book demonstrates this:

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgment this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings.

And so, as Hardy states in his preface to the fifth edition, “the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive” but instead “to be oftener charged with impressions than convictions”. Hardy is brave enough not to write something of his time, that conforms or emulates the standards of his age, but instead to write something timeless by challenging those standards. It’s not polemical but provocative, an attempt to shake those of us who consider ourselves open-minded out of the complacent blank of culture in which we always wrap ourselves.

So for me, Tess of the d’Urbervilles excels in two respects. Firstly, as I have noted persistently, it’s just an excellent novel. Its characters are great; its plot is captivating; its pathos is without peer. I didn’t just love this book; I loved reading it, which is an entirely different thing. Secondly, it is truly timeless, not just for attitudes that it conveys—as these may change—but for the sceptical sentiment towards social norms of thought and morality that it encourages. Those norms have definitely changed since Hardy’s time, but the fact remains: we still have a lot of work to do. Hardy reminds us that people often don’t deserve the inequity society heaps upon them.

The Internet isn’t for porn, silly human. The Internet is for spam! It’s an interesting spin on a truism of our times.

We are seeing the first reported smartphone botnet. We are seeing the future. Policing of the future isn’t going to be about Robocop busting drug dealers and car thieves on the street of Detroit. Automated drones might be part of the package, but there will still be boots on the ground—just heavily assisted by highly-networked, algorithm-boosted technology. Policing is no longer about the heart and the gut, and as Liz Kavanaugh explains in Rule 34, the days of the Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus are long gone. Criminals are, as always, leveraging the latest in technology as they develop newer, more lucrative ways to make money.

Rule 34 is a look at, to borrow Charles Stross’ nomenclature, Criminality 2.0: crime for the networked age. Part police procedural, part philosophical rumination on the Singularity bubble, Rule 34 is a heady cocktail of near-future speculation and present-day description of the challenges to law enforcement, national sovereignty, and daily life posed by all those thousands of networked devices clamouring for our attention. It’s set five years after Halting State—but it only involves two of the other book’s minor characters, so feel free to read this without reading the other one. Indeed, I liked Rule 34 better.

Halting State and Rule 34 are both narrated in the second person. This is unusual, to say the least, and I know it frustrates many readers. I didn’t examine it all that much when I reviewed Halting State, except to say that I didn’t notice it after the first few pages. Well I noticed it more in this book, because occasionally Stross would slip into the first person for a chapter or two—and that had to be deliberate. Indeed, the second-person narration has an interesting reason that makes sense by the end of the book, though I don’t want to spoil it. Also, second person is a nice compromise between the objectivity of limited-omniscient third person and the unreliability of first person. It has that same first-person intimacy but comes without the spectre of deception attached.

And I don’t even think that the narrative tense is what makes Rule 34 difficult to read for some. I think it’s the dialect. Not the Scottish dialect, though there is that: the 2020s dialect. It hit me about halfway through the book, and after that everything became easier to read. Stross is writing using the idiom of the time. To explain, consider how we speak today compared with ten, twenty, fifty years ago. How common now is it to talk about tweeting, texting, IMing, Googling, Facebooking, etc.? How used are we to slinging the verbiage of the iPhone, the Android, the 3G and LTE and other abbreviations of our day? Someone from the 1950s, 1970s, or even the 1990s might have a hard time penetrating this obscure dialect. That’s what Stross is doing here: he’s narrating as if to an audience where all this technology, like CopSpace and pads that pull VMs down from the cloud, is normal. It’s part of everyday life, as surely as your coffeemaker or your refridgerator is part of yours. When technology becomes a common tool instead of a fancy new toy, when it becomes commonplace and part of the common conversation, we cease thinking about how weird we might sound to the uninitiated. Stross doesn’t bother infodumping much on us, but instead has us assimilate by exposure.

I like that Stross has created such a neat, self-contained vision of the near future. The idea is not to be accurate, of course, but to look at what this extrapolation says about our present day. How does extending current trends reflect what we are doing now? All authors have their bailiwicks and hang-ups, and Stross in particular loves to write about artificial intelligence. But like any good writer, his relationship with these ideas continues to evolve. He has written in Singularity-addled universes, but now he is looking at futures where the Singularity hasn’t happened and probably will never happen (though in this case, I think it’s far more ambiguous than Dr. MacDonald claims in his lecture to Liz). Rule 34 is definitely about artificial intelligence, but it’s about the understated, what we might consider more rudimentary artificial intelligence that often gets ignored in favour of the more sensational, conscious AIs of blockbuster notoriety. (That being said, I think ATHENA has more in common with SkyNet than it does some of the more human-like, personality-driven AIs we see these days.)

The plot of Rule 34 is convoluted and driven by coincidence—and that’s probably an understatement. There is a reason for all the coincidence that gradually becomes apparent; while that wasn’t quite enough to quash my unease with the serendipity of this story, it was sufficient to sustain my satisfaction overall. Allow me to serve as an example, however, and attest that one does not need the language of derivatives and credit default swaps encoded in one’s genes to enjoy this book. I won’t claim to have followed every twist and turn of the various machinations and counter-machinations at work. But the shifting perspectives and the ongoing investigation help illuminate, if not explain, the goings-on of the story.

I like most of the characters (if “like” is the right word here). I like that Liz is bitter about being passed over for promotion but still professional enough to work with a rival and caring enough to help an ex-girlfriend in trouble. I like that she puts aside her past problems with Kemal so they team up here—Kemal gets a more sympathetic portrayal in this book. Anwar has to be my favourite, just because he’s so hapless at everything he touches. He gets in way over his head and thinks no one will notice, when he turns out to be one of the fulcra around which the plot pivots. To say that I “like” the Toymaker would definitely be inaccurate, but I do like how Stross explores his psychology and motivation: he is more than a villain or a minion, less than a mastermind.

Rule 34 throws up a lot of hurdles that could reduce one’s enjoyment: second-person narration, idiomatic diction, and complicated plot. These challenges are also the source of its success. It’s a book, I guess, where its flaws (such as they may be perceived) are also strengths, given the right type of reader—proof, again, that literature is eternally subjective because humans are so diverse. If you’re interested in looking at what we might have made of society, policing, and the Web in ten years—as opposed to the ten thousand of some books about AI—then give Rule 34 a try.

Living in space is hard. Like, really hard. Like, super almost-impossibly-crazy-stupid hard. Leviathan Wakes has some great moments that illustrate the various hazards of living in space, and it underscores the importance of Earth’s continued existence to the otherwise estranged colonies and stations. Yet even it has a fairly optimistic outlook on our ability to harness the solar system for our needs. Containment, on the other hand, makes even starting up a colony on Venus an issue. Christian Cantrell goes for brutal realism when it comes to some of the challenges facing the Venusian colonists, even if he is somewhat less realistic in the technology and plot of this story.

I found the technology in Containment somewhat paradoxical. They have quantum computers and nuclear fusion, but they still can’t communicate reliably with Earth? (There are other reasons for this, of course, but I won’t get into that.) And why does it take until someone like Arik comes along to develop artificial photosynthesis by using evolutionary algorithms? We already do that in robotics; why wouldn’t someone think to do that in biology?

I can set those nits aside, though. It’s clear Cantrell has done the research regarding trying to survive in an environment like that present on the surface of Venus. He has plenty of cool science-fictional ideas, ranging from genetic engineering to robotics and cybernetics. In many respects, Gen V reminds me of the Supers from Nancy Kress’ Beggars and Choosers—so advanced they leave their progenitors in the dust. But Containment isn’t a book about the complications surrounding genetic engineering, or even a book about the challenges facing our society in the future. The society of Earth in Containment is practically non-existent. As Arik works on solving the mystery he discovers after recovering from a near-fatal accident, he stumbles across a secret bigger than he would ever have imagined. Cantrell pulls an M. Night Shyamalan (literally) and turns our frame of reference on its head.

This twist should have been just another OMG moment in an already compelling story—except it wasn’t. As much as Containment is a clever vision that mixes environmental catastrophes with solar system colonization, Cantrell’s writing drags the story back down into mediocrity. His offense is one of the most mundane: telling rather than showing. In between chapters set in the present and flashbacks to the past, there are chapters consisting solely of infodumps about the colony and its history. Infodumps have their place in any story, and especially in science fiction, but there are classy infodumps with their own rooms and curtains that cover the window, and then there are the cheap, trashy infodumps that proposition you on a street corner while you drive by. Containment’s infodumps are, sadly, of the latter variety: very plain, by the book, and with all-too-little sex appeal. They read like something straight out of the backgrounder wiki or bible that writers often prepare for themselves prior to writing a story. Thus, while the infodumps unquestionably contain cool ideas and tantalizing visions of the future, they quench any momentum the story has developed and bring the plot to a grinding halt.

Showing cedes the floor to telling elsewhere in the book too. Rather than demonstrate Arik’s feelings towards others, the narrator often resorts to explaining, in detail, Arik’s thought process. As with exposition, a little of this is fine and probably even necessary. However, Containment spends more time in Arik’s head or in the exposi-space in between than it does in action sequences or intense exchanges of dialogue. The conflict between characters here is watered-down and B-movie in its delivery: the minor characters like Cadie and Cam are either wooden or one-note in their stock reactions to everything.

I loved the twist around which Containment pivots, and the mystery leading up to the reveal. It’s dramatic and believable, changing the direction of Cantrell’s plot and themes entirely will preserving a great deal of ground he has already laid. Arik’s solution is innovative and exciting, so there’s little reason for this book to be unsatisfying—except, alas, the writing. I just had a hard time enjoying the book, enjoying reading it. The ideas here are assembled nicely, but the work as a whole lacks the polish to make it truly shine. Containment is science fiction where that fusion between science and fiction hasn’t quite taken hold—plenty of both, but not quite in the right proportions.

I don’t read comic books that much.

Given my reading habits, and how quickly I read, I find it difficult to go out and get every issue of a serial. I’ve read some collected works, like Sandman, and enjoyed them—storytelling is storytelling, whether it’s in words or art on a page. Digital editions might help, once we finally give up on that DRM nonsense. However, even with that hurdle cleared, I’ll admit I’m not a very visual person. Pictures, whether they are paintings or prints or ink drawings, do not communicate with me the same way words on a page do—they don’t, as I explained to a friend while we saw Picasso at the AGO, convey as much semantic information to me. This is why, above any other literary form, I am so drawn to the novel: it’s a word-dense method of storytelling, and that appeals to me.

Nevertheless, I think I “dig” comics. I appreciate them, perhaps not as fervently as other fans, but with an eye towards their cultural and artistic significance nonetheless. Even if that weren’t the case, after Lynne M. Thomas’ excellent Chicks Dig Time Lords, pre-ordering this from Amazon was a no-brainer. Besides, we nerd genres need to stick together!

At first, I was a little disappointed with Chicks Dig Comics. It might be that I’m less excited about comics than I am about Doctor Who, so perhaps that dampened my enthusiasm for the subjects of these essays. However, I was expecting more of the focused critique of the medium that I saw in Chicks Dig Time Lords. Many of the essays therein were personal, yes, but they always referred back to the show, its production, and its delivery. It was an edification for me, as a fan who came to the series through its 2005 regeneration, to read those accounts. Chicks Dig Comics definitely has a more personal feel to it; almost every essay is about a female fan’s involvement with comic books and how this has enhanced or intersected with her other identities and roles in life.

In that sense, this book doesn’t disappoint—it just wasn’t quite what I expected at first. The essays and interviews are thoughtful, well-written, and above all, insightful. As I continued through the book, my initial disappointment evaporated and then condensed into approval. Because as I kept reading, I started to realize that Chicks Dig Comics isn’t actually “a celebration of comic books” like its subtitle claims. It’s a celebration—and a confession—of the experiences women have with comic books, their relationship to comic books over time. Hence, while the discussions of how most comic books seem aimed and young men are certainly there, they aren’t the focus here.

The value of Chicks Dig Comics comes from the fact it provides space for minorities to speak up about what comics mean to them. The value comes from a reader getting to hear about an experience and say, “Yes, I understand what you mean completely—I’ve had a similar one.” It’s that instant connection to the authors, that sense that you are not alone. It’s putting into words what other fans have felt but could not express. It’s a celebration of women who love comics by women who love comics—and that’s awesome.

The moment this clicked didn’t come until all the way on page 129, during the interview with Greg Rucka. In response to writing so many series with women as the leads, he says this:

But, I think, in all honesty? In all sincerity? I female-identify. I like writing about female characters. I can even go back through my writing—and here I’m talking about the stuff I wrote when I was in my teens … and those stories almost universally have female leads.

And then, to the follow-up question regarding his conscious choice to portray genderqueer characters:

Also, inasmuch as I have always been aware of feminism and interested in feminist politics, I’ve been very aware of sexual politics and issues of sexuality. And, not to be glib about it, but if I female-identify and I’m in a heterosexual relationship, what does that make me? I’ve always been comfortable in my own body, enough that I’m pretty content being biologically male. But certainly intellectually, and emotionally, I’d say that I’ve always identified far more as female than male.

This resonates with me quite a bit. I very carefully reached up to the top left corner of the page and deliberately folded it down into a neat triangle. I don’t dog-ear pages! I annotate; I underline, but to crease the page? I did it anyway.

My exploration of feminism and involvement in feminist discourse has been as much about exploring my own gender identity, and the way I perform gender, as it has been about critiquing gender roles in wider society. A lot of what Rucka says above applies to me—and I’ve said it in various bits and pieces to people at one time or another, but I don’t know if I’ve ever put it all together so succinctly. I too am straight and pretty comfortable in my body (my teeth could be better). But I tend to form stronger friendships with women than I do men. Like Rucka, my stories often involve women protagonists or at least very important women main characters. And I’m intensely interested in what it’s like to be a woman. (I’m not sure whether the relationship between these last two things is cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause.) It is a perspective I cannot, owing to my biology and socialization, realize myself; I have to seek it vicariously through literature and discussions with female friends. For me, personally, my involvement with feminism has been a quest for empathy.

The bottom line here, though, is that this is a book about women and comics, about women who love comics, and all the awesomeness that results. It crosses generations and occupations—there are essays and interviews here from fans, from authors, from editors, from artists. Rather than presenting a prescriptive, monolithic definition of what it means to be a female fan, Chicks Digs Comics embraces a diversity of perspectives. There are differing opinions on what makes a female character empowered, for instance, or the nature of Barbara Gordon’s transition from able-bodied Batgirl to the disabled Oracle. As with so many things viewed through the lens of feminism, I think it can be tempting to simply condemn comics for being bastions of the male gaze or otherwise demeaning to women—and some of the contributors note the surprised reactions they receive when other women learn of their self-professed feminist fandom. Chicks Digs Comics belies this approach to feminism by exposing the nuance that makes comics worthwhile.

I don’t always read comics. But I do occasionally read books about comics! Because sometimes, things about comics aren’t just about comics, in the same way that comics aren’t just about spandex and onomatapeia. There’s something good here, something human and true. It’s academic, and meaningful, and personal. So if you like comics, even if you don’t read them all that often, read this. And if you don’t like comics? Maybe this will lift the cloud of confusion over why so many women do.

I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible.

Keeping Earth habitable is a pressing concern today. Even if we manage to avoid eco-catastrophe (and I’m optimistic on this), that’s only a small hurdle in the grand scheme of the cosmos. We only have about a billion years left before the Sun swells so much that it cooks the atmosphere. A few billion years after that, the Sun will engulf Earth itself—bye, bye, homeworld. Even if we manage to emigrate to the outer solar system or other solar systems entirely, we’re still just buying time until the end of the universe—whether it’s heat death or a Big Crunch or something else entirely. We can’t outrun eternity.

Of course, if we are around in a billion, let alone ten billion years, I somehow doubt we would recognize our future selves. Considering how much we differ from our hominin ancestors a million years ago, I suspect that evolution—natural or artificially-induced—will carry us away from this body plan. If we are going to migrate, we will adapt our forms—in body, or just in mind. Diaspora is a vision of a possible future, one in which humanity has diversified itself, speciated itself, and it attempting to find a way to survive.

Diaspora is a challenging novel, intentionally so. It is no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled posthumanity. By the thirtieth century, humanity exists in three forms: flesh humans on Earth, embodied robots floating around the outer solar system, and polises of minds running as software on immense architectures. The main characters are exclusively minds from a polis. After an unanticipated, unexplained gamma-ray burst irradiates Earth, precipitating the extinction of flesh humanity, these minds resolve to explain the phenomenon and find a way of protecting humanity from it in the future. This triggers a strange and wonderful exploration of physical space and theoretical physics, and more mathematical exposition than you can shake a stick at.

The bulk of this book is a discussion of high-level mathematics and highly theoretical, even speculative, physics. Everything from high-energy wormholes to alternative universe topologies makes an appearance here. As a mathematician, and one who loves the abstract, axiomatic fields, I enjoyed most of this. It’s nice to step into someone else’s series of “what if” scenarios. When these are combined with the exploration of the physical universe and encounters with extraterrestrial life, it’s even cooler. The ideas that Egan explores here are intriguing enough to make me want to give Diaspora 5 stars—if it were a blog post, maybe.

Greg Egan bypasses the conventional structure of a novel, giving us instead mathematical musings in four acts. Technically Diaspora has everything a novel needs: characters, dialogue, even a plot. But with nature as the sole antagonist, the threats in this book are extremely distant. They are existential (though I hesitate to use that word when these characters are cloning themselves thousands of times over), but only in the most distant sense. This is literally a book about the end of the world as we don’t know it, and it’s almost as difficult for me to wrap my head around as the physics and mathematics are.

I think it would be tempting to seize upon the very abstract subject matter and level the charge that Diaspora is difficult because, with so many posthumans leaving flesh behind for a sixteen-dimensional universe, it loses something of what it means to be human. I understand why some people would feel this way, but I don’t think it’s the case at all. In spite of the very technical and dry dialogue between these characters, Egan makes it clear that their main concern—other than survival—is the preservation of humanity. There are, if not conflicts, then arguments between characters about the best path to take to remain human—the merits of flesh versus software, the perils of solipsism. Indeed, Diaspora is about the ultimate quest to remain human in spite of the universe itself stacking the deck against you.

I’m not going to give Diaspora five stars, because I think other authors have done this better while still delivering a very compelling story. I’m not going to give Diaspora one star, because it is an amazing collection of ideas and dialogues about humanity, progress, and physics. It’s like a really trippy blog post, just masquerading as a novel because novels, like bow ties, are cool. And like anything pretending to be something it’s not, Diaspora isn’t quite as satisfying as the conventional novel we’ve been trained to enjoy. It’s not bad, but different, and anything too different has to work a lot harder to earn acclaim. I’m willing to meet it halfway, so I’ll give it a solid three stars.

I majored in math and minored in English and philosophy; I’m teaching math and English to high school students come this fall. The intersectionality of this novel is kind of tailor-made for me—I suspect other people might have a hard time with it, and I want to be very upfront with this opinion lest my enthusiasm for the subject lead you astray. But if you are willing to make the effort and tolerate the paper-thin plot, then … wow. Yeah, in a way, totally worth it.

Here’s a tip: if you want to disappear and assume a new identity, don’t befriend children and become their mentor. Inevitably they will discover you have a mystery past that you don’t want to talk about. And children are really, really good at uncovering things adults don’t want them to know. It’s like a sixth sense most of us lose at puberty—the moment an adult evades a question, the child files it away under, “I will ransack your house and break into your puzzle box later.” So whatever you do, avoid children. They are the enemy.

Master Pregaldin doesn’t listen to this advice in The Ice Owl. It’s not necessarily his undoing, but I think it might have helped. Of course, The Ice Owl isn’t about Pregaldin—and it’s not even really about the eponymous owl, though there is one. It’s about Thorn, a girl who is mature beyond her years because of all the time she has spent being shuttled around the galaxy at the speed of light, her somewhat less mature mother in tow. Thorn is an answer looking for a question, someone with smarts but not much in the way of guidance over even an interesting problem to solve.

The setting of The Ice Owl is almost invisible, although the politics are important to the plot. Thorn is not indigenous to this city, which exists on the terminator of a tidally-locked planet and is undergoing a … disagreement of leadership. A puritanical religious sect is poised to take over, which would be bad for the class of society to which Thorn and her mother belong. But what can they do? As they wait for the inevitable to happen, Thorn befriends Master Pregaldin and badgers him until he agrees to become her teacher. They learn a lot from each other, and he gives her the rare—perhaps unique—hibernating ice owl. What a dumb move. Carolyn Gillman might as well have etched, “This thing is doomed” to the side of the owl’s refridgeration unit.

The coup eventually happens, and Thorn and her mother have to evacuate post-haste. But Thorn has changed, and now she isn’t always in solidarity with her mother. She tries to leave her mother behind, go on to another planet, one connected to Pregaldin’s past—but a mutual friend comes to get her, reunites her with her mother, and we all learn the true meaning of family. Or something.

To be honest, the whole resolution of this story vexed me. It didn’t make much sense, in my opinion, and was too rushed. Gillman seems to spend the first part of this story talking about one thing—Thorn’s isolation, her autonomy, her thirst to do something with her life—but then changes gears and makes it all about Thorn’s relationship with her mother, her responsibilities, her premature ascension as head of the household. It’s … messy.

Despite these flaws, The Ice Owl really does strike me as a work worthy of the Hugo nomination. It is science fiction in that most wondrous of senses: rare species as metaphors, big ideas writ small in the background instead of in our faces, and characters who are like us—with pasts lingering behind them, and futures stretching ahead, and motivations spanning the gap between. It’s not a brilliant story, and the conflict is tepid to say the least—but as a short work of fiction, it’s all right.

So we can’t go back in time—but what if we could see back in time? Glimpsing the past is almost as common as stories involving actual time travel. In The Man Who Ended History, however, Ken Liu puts a very intimate and emotional twist on reliving and remembering the atrocities of war. Coupled with the archaeological premise that these observational trips to the past are always a one-time affair—each act of observation destroys the particles that allow the observation to happen—this allows Liu to explore the ramifications of allowing the past to intrude on the present so vividly.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way we learn history in Ontario high schools. Grade 10 history is compulsory, but it seems like history ends after World War II—we just spend so much time on it. And yeah, it deserves to have a lot of time spent on it; it was a big deal. But so were many things that happened after 1950—things I have only vague ideas of, since we didn’t talk about them in history class. Recently, however, I’ve begun to notice that there is plenty I don’t know about World War II—and I’m not referring to all the details that get glossed over because there isn’t enough time. The entire Sino-Japanese War portion of the war is, as best I can recall, mentioned in nary a footnote in our history texts. Japan was involved, and not in a good way. That’s about all I learned in school.

If it weren’t for reading frivolous things like science fiction, I wouldn’t be aware that the Holocaust and similar ethnic cleansings in Europe were far from the only atrocities happening during that war. It took a novella with shady particle physics and time travel, of a sort, to tell me about Unit 731 and Pingyang. We’re so selective when it comes to “history” and the idea of “historical truth”, and this doesn’t even have to be the result of nefarious intentions. Simply put, humans have terrible memories, and we let our emotions and biases colour those memories. Liu himself makes this point through the unreliability of the people who back to witness the activities at Unit 731.

The device of making each trip a destructive excavation of the past presents an interesting dilemma to the reader. And therein lies my problem with The Man Who Ended History: I couldn’t agree with Wei. Sorry, but Yours Is Not Science if it is not verifiable. The emotional retellings of descendants of victims travelling into the past is not verifiable. Maybe sending trained historians might have worked better, but I doubt it. In the end, observing the past isn’t the magic bullet to historicity. As long as humans are the one compiling the history, we will never be objective.

Liu doesn’t claim we could be, though, and I don’t want to conflate my reactions against his main character with an idea that this story is poorly-written. On the contrary, it’s magnificently done. And it works well at its length—a short story would have been tantalizingly brief, a novel far too plodding. Plus, in its documentary format, it is more of a series of scenes than an actual narrative with any kind of plot. It’s a carefully designed and executed thought experiment, which is a grand tradition within science fiction.

Definitely Hugo material. Perhaps not Hugo-winning—we’ll see what I think of the other nominees in the novella category. But The Man Who Ended History takes real history—somewhat forgotten history, at least for this poor, publicly-schooled Westerner—and asks questions about how new technology might force us to confront our past. That’s what science fiction is all about.

From the other reviews here on Goodreads, I am relieved to see that I am not the only one whose dominant feeling while reading Cast in Shadow was one of confusion. Michelle Sagara has clearly come up with a creative, perhaps even compelling world. It’s populated by all sorts of fascinating species: the immortal Barrani and Dragons and Tha'lani, the mortal humans and Leontine and Aerians. Elantra is a city like many others in fantasy, poised on that brink of industrialization, the throbbing heart of an empire riddled with corruption, magical or otherwise. Amidst all this, Sagara gives us a female protagonist who has clawed her way up from poverty and destitution to be the youngest member of the Hawks, the crime-solving unit of Elantra’s judiciary. And Kaylin’s stake in this case is personal, with all the attendant baggage and issues one would expect. With all of these components, Cast in Shadow should be an awesome urban fantasy thriller. But it’s not.

As others have singled out, the problem is one of context. Sagara is inconsistent in how and when she chooses to deliver her exposition. The first few chapters are an almost overwhelming soup of names and information; then the flow diminishes to a mere trickle for the rest of the novel. Time and again, characters will be poised on the brink of a big revelation, only for them to stop up their mouths and say, “No, you aren’t ready for that.” Half of this book consists of various people from different species alluding to aspects of their culture that never gets explained. Sometimes, when an author does this, it’s to build tension and make the audience yearn to know more. Indeed I did—except I never felt like I got a payoff at the end. I just felt confused.

The plot itself is simple enough to understand. Kaylin used to be an impoverished child, orphaned after the death of her mother, living in the fiefdom of Nightshade. Think urban gang warfare in a pre-industrial city. Eventually (we’re never quite told how) she escapes this area of Elantra and manages to enrol in the Hawks, where she becomes an up-and-coming investigator. She has intense, personal relationships with high-ranking members, such as Sergeant Marcus Kassan, a Leontine (every bit as lion-like as the name implies) and the Hawklord himself, an Aerian. Kaylin is special in every sense of the word, for she has magical powers she can’t trust herself to control. These make her a danger, one that the Hawklord has perhaps unwisely vouchsafed for. And when it turns out that the murders are death magic sacrifices designed to turn Kaylin into a superpowered killing machine … well, that spoils everyone’s day.

Cast in Shadow is not a complicated book, so there is no reason it should be so hard to follow. Yet I repeatedly found myself wonder who was present when characters were conversing, or indeed just what was happening during a particular scene. Sagara' description, like her exposition, is inconsistent in its ebb and flow. At times she belabours the nature of Kaylin’s wardrobe, the arrangement of a courtyard or a tower … and then suddenly, the verbiage gives way to conversations about magic or history, and just as suddenly I have no idea where these people are or what they’re doing.

It’s disheartening, because I would like to love this book. Kaylin is competent but flawed, wounded from her childhood in Nightshade and mistrustful of the people working with her on this case. Sagara does a good job portraying Kaylin’s growth throughout the novel, as she struggles with working with Severn, whom she blames for an unforgivable act while they were both in Nightshade. I really enjoyed watching Kaylin grapple with the various forces that seemed to be subtly—or not so subtly—manipulating and using her for their own ends. In this respect, I was fully willing to immerse myself into the politics of Elantra—if only Sagara had managed to make that possible.

And as I said above, the world of Elantra itself is rich with possibility. The city is cosmopolitan in nature, with the high court dominated by the immortal races while the mortals go about their lives in the more mercantile areas. It appears that the Emperor is a Dragon, a species whose members are humanoid for the most part but can transform into a more conventional serpentine form and wreak devastation. In many ways, Sagara’s species don’t seem all that original or creative—the Aerians have wings; the Leontines are lions! But, even if she doesn’t always communicate it as clearly as I would have liked, there are definitely hints of more complicated cultures underlying all these species. That’s something I would love to see more often in urban fantasy, which usually constrains its non-human ventures to more stereotypical conceptions of elves and dwarfs and ghouls….

Cast in Shadow is a book burdened by flawed writing. At its centre lies a good, old-fashioned mystery—multiple homicides with a clear intent in mind that means nothing good for Kaylin or for the Empire. From the ending, it is clear that Sagara has an entire series conceived in her mind—but I’m not sure I’m willing to read the next book. In the tenuous balance between storytelling and style, Sagara excels at the former but flounders at the latter.