the_siobhan | 2013 books: 49-53 (Reply)

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear

I'm pretty sure I paid money for this one at one point. It has my name in the cover.

I didn't realize until I was about a third of the way into it, but this is the author of Eion - which is the book I started the year with. Coincidentally the events in the story start a few days before Christmas and it ends on New Year's Day. (I could immediately tell it was written in the 90s - in all the mentions of Christmas there was never any acknowledgement that anybody celebrates anything else at that time of year.)

This book starts off with a similar problem to The Coming of the King - it's written in period language, only in this case it's the lingo of the USA in 2047. It's entirely logical and my brain caught onto the cadence pretty quickly. (The use of adverbs and adjectives to replace nouns for example, is pretty easy to normalize, and I was highly amused to see the word "silky" used in the exact same way that "shiny" was used in the Firefly universe.) Still, it's a bit of a hump to overcome when you first crack the cover and I find it does create a distance between the characters and the reader.

The story is almost but not quite a murder mystery. Like in Eion, Bear is more interested in world-building than in the plot, but I think in this book he manages to combine the two a lot better. And the world he creates is an interesting one; nanotechnology and robotics have changed everything from medicine to home appliances. The US is still very much a two-tiered society, with the best jobs going to those who are "therapied" into a complete absence of neurosis. He uses this framework to explore concepts of self-awareness, self-identity and the nature of consciousness. Tall order and I think he does a decent job at it.

The Dreaming Jewels, The Cosmic Rape and Venus Plus X
by Theodore Sturgeon

I got this book in 1990 from the Book Of The Month Club. Do you guys remember the Book of the Month Club? I had completely forgotten about them, they were my pushers on and off for years. I looked it up and they're still going, but now you only get 4 books for $1 to start off with.

So. The books. As soon as I started in on The Dreaming Jewels I was afraid I wasn't going to like Sturgeon's writing. In the very first chapter the reader is introduced to the protagonist and his parents. The parents are Bad People. In order to emphasise just how much they are Bad People they are painted as almost cartoonishly evil.

And really that formula continues throughout his writing. The people aren't fully fleshed, three-dimensional characters. They are archetypes - the beautiful, selfless, sacrificing woman, the impulsive but good-hearted hero, the evil genius, the man who hates and fears anyone stronger than himself and hates and abuses anyone weaker, the honest and hard-working salt of the earth types. And so on and so on. The plots aren't particularly complicated either. Events progress pretty much in a straight line. What makes these stories interesting is the concept behind the story.

In The Dreaming Jewels it's about an alien lifeform that has resided on earth aside humans without ever being detected, and that creates life as a by-product of it's dreams. In The Cosmic Rape it's an invading alien creature who takes over entire planets by first infecting a single individual and then enslaving the hive mind - except that humans don't have a hive mind. Venus Plus X is his take on gender and the "war between the sexes". Interestingly, this is the one of the trilogy where the characters are the most three-dimensional to me.

An enjoyable read but I'm unlikely to re-read it.

Tripoint by C. J. Cherryh

Apparently I bought this from John K King Books in Detroit. For $4. I suspect that it was a while ago.

I've always loved Cherryh's writing. This is my first crack at one of her Merchanter novels, which take place in merchant spaceships piloted by extended families.

I've just started this one. The premise so far is that a woman from one ship was once raped by the crewman of another. The rape results in a son, who she decides to keep and raise. The son is now twenty and feels like an outsider on a ship where it is known that his biological father is a man considered to be an enemy by the crew. The ships have managed to avoid each other in the interm, but now they have just docked on the same space station and the woman who has been assaulted wants her revenge.

I expect this one will probably last me until the end of the year. Cherryh's text is terse but dense, and although it's not a thick book it won't be a super quick read. Plus you know, Christmas.

So 53 books in a year. And at least 40 of them have gone into the giveaway pile. Achievement: Bookshelf unlocked. I may go through the stack when I have some free time and see if anybody wants any of them before they get sent to the second-hand store.