Agent to the Stars

John Scalzi’s first book. It’s a first contact story about a gross but friendly alien species that hires a Hollywood agent to help introduce them to humanity. It’s really funny, but has some debut novel shortcomings – namely, very little character development. All the characters are pretty much the same, with the same witty snappy funny dialogue. Still though, a very enjoyable book that made me laugh. I like Scalzi a lot.

Android’s Dream

I was feeling under the weather and went on a John Scalzi rampage, since his books are not too straining and are so fun to read.

Android’s Dream is about a rockstar brilliant secret agent type of guy who gets roused from semi-retirement in order to find an impossibly rare sheep (literally) to head off a war with an alien race. To perform the task, he creates the world’s first truly intelligent AI, using brain and personality date from his dead army buddy. Things get messy when factions from the aliens start trying to find the sheep as well, and/or thwart our hero’s efforts, often with violence. Things get even messier when the “sheep” turns out to be a human female (who unfortunately has a large percentage of dormant sheep DNA) with her own rights and opinions. Not to mention, a underground but incredibly well-funded and long-reaching religion is getting involved as well.

The book is more humor than traditional science fiction, but it’s not as silly as it sounds. Sheep? Really? He makes it work. I liked it.

Fuzzy Nation

A “remake” of an old sci-fi story written by John Scalzi (who wrote Old Man’s War, which I loved). It’s about a freelancer working for a planetary strip-mining company. He discovers a vein of precious stones that’s going to make him rich, only at the same time he also comes across a cute fuzzy species that just might be sentient… which could change all the rules of the corporate mining game. He’s a former lawyer with an attitude, which makes for some snappy, funny dialogue. A short easy and thoroughly entertaining read.

Mass Effect: Revelation

Mass Effect: Revelation
by Drew Karpyshyn

This is a light sci-fi novel based on the video game Mass Effect. The story is a “prequel” to the events of the game. A military hero helps a young female scientist who finds herself in danger as the only survivor of the destruction of her classified research center. In the process they uncover assorted schemes involving the research done at the center, and encounter a “bad cop” who uses his power for his own ends. The story is a little exciting, but ends just as it’s warming up – I guess that’s the point, to get readers excited about playing the game to see how the plot will unfold. This book is really easy to read – the writing is almost (but not quite) too simple to be enjoyable. One interesting thing is that at times, it seemed like the author was deliberately including game references; for instance, there is a scene where he makes a point of describing looting corpses for extra ammo.

Star Trek (2009 Movie)

Saw this on blu-ray DVD with the boyfriend.

Star Trek was a good movie. I’m really not that familiar with any of the original series and movies, though I do know roughly who the main characters were. So I didn’t have much to compare it to, but I did like the movie. The story was interesting and the pacing was good. Plenty of action and sense of humor. I liked the characters and the portrayal of the relationship between Spock and Kirk. I think if I knew the original material better, I might actually appreciate it more.

Avatar (2009 movie)

I saw this in 3D in the theaters with coworkers.

I actually liked this movie a lot when I saw it. It has a simple but coherent plot and is very beautiful to look at.

One thing that I thought was interesting while watching the movie was that our hero, in the second half of the movie, goes to the natives and incites them to bloody merciless war by demonizing his own race. Then, they go and slaughter scores of marines, who are, like our hero was at first, more or less “just guys”.

Later, others told me that I had kind of projected these ideas onto the movie, when the movie itself portrayed our hero, not as a bloodthirsty betrayer, but as a heroic rebel protecting the noble savages, and the marines as “faceless grunts”. I’m willing to accept that, looking back. Though I guess my interpretation still made it more interesting for me!

I was surprised that the movie doesn’t seem to encourage empathy. Instead of learning to accept another people even though he’s not one of them, instead our hero seems to decide that the navi are his “true people”, and goes to defend them and later become one of them, giving up his ties to humanity. Instead of encouraging the navi to understand the humans’ motivations and plans, he orders them to pretty much just kill them all because they can’t be stopped or reasoned with.

However, given that, I was rankled by the abruptness of his transformation… for so long, he is just going through the motions, obviously unable to relate, and then suddenly he feels he’s a child of Eywa too.

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

Interesting story plays on the idea that faster-than-light travel is equivalent to time travel. It features a far-future world where a god-like artificial intelligence has decreed that NO ONE may use time travel to interfere with causality (that is, possibly interfere with the AI’s own evolution/existence). This god-like AI also scattered human life around the universe, effectively creating multitudinous alien races. Also there are amazing “cornucopia machines” that can manufacture any known physical object.

The penalties for  violating causality are severe and destructive, so much that various governments have secret agencies dedicated to ensuring that no one does it on their watch. The main characters are two such agents, independently visiting an anti-technology civilization whose oppressive government plans to use time travel to win a war against a mysterious alien invader.

But these aliens are no typical invaders – instead they are a sort of information transfer swarm. Their goal is to gather info about any foreign culture they visit, and also to “grant wishes” — to pass on the information they have. Naturally though, this wreaks complete havoc on a civilization that’s been kept in the dark for generations by its government.

The writing style has the dryness and the lack of appealing characters that often shows up in hard science fiction – but I thought the story wasn’t too “hard” itself. The story is interesting, though at times it is difficult to follow.

District 9

I liked this movie a lot. Saw it in the theater with friends.

I liked how even though I didn’t like the main character at first, throughout the movie he grew on me and by the end I was feeling quite empathetic.

I liked how the movie retained a realistic documentary-like feeling even once they stopped using mostly documentary-like clips and started using mostly traditional omniscent view. In other words, the transition from the introductory documentary style to normal movie style was very smooth.

I liked that it was a kind of tragic story, but was not the tragic story I’d been expecting (I had expected the classic first-contact misunderstanding story).

I liked that extreme stress had a noticeable effect on the main character and affected his decision-making capabilities.

I liked that the setting made the story seem more universal, and I liked that the government abuse theme was subtle.

And actually, I also liked the open-ended-ness. A lot of questions about the aliens (where did they come from? why were they starving? why was there only one smart guy among all of them?) were never answered or even brought up; however, all of the questions seem like they COULD have answers. That is, none of the unexplained elements seemed like they were left unexplained just because the creators didn’t have a plan or a background for them.

Zoe’s Tale

Zoe’s Tale

by John Scalzi

Zoe’s Tale retells the events of Last Colony from the perspective of Zoe, the teenage daughter of  Last Colony‘s protagonist.

It’s a quick easy read and is pretty enjoyable; though the first-person voice of a teenage girl can be a little grating at first, the voice smooths out over the course of the book. It is very different from  Last Colony as well, even though it takes place at the same time, and centers around the same events. The plot is very different.

My only complaint is that there are really only two important things in Zoe’s Tale: when she fends off the werewolves by treating them fairly, and when she makes the Obin take her to see General Gau and secure her a way to protect her home. It’s great that these two points answer some questions left over from Last Colony. But I kind of felt like the rest of the story was just constructed AROUND these two ideas, and was treated as less important.

It’s a pleasant visit back to the world and characters of Old Man’s War, but it’s not as actually good.

Book Impressions Digest: Jack McDevitt

May 22, 2009

Update: I read another McDevitt book.

Devil’s Eye (Alex Benedict 4)

I really liked this one a lot. It has a little something for everyone: an action conspiracy, a mystery that needs Science to unravel it, a high-stakes Armageddon emergency, plus diplomatic relations with the aliens. This one doesn’t have any archaeological detective work – just ordinary investigation – but I thought the mystery was particularly clever.

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April 23, 2009

Jack McDevitt was scheduled to be at I-CON 2009, which I had planned to attend, so I bought Talent For War so I’d have something to get signed. I loved it so much that I read four more McDevitt books in a frenzy.

A Talent For War (Alex Benedict 1)

I really really liked this book. The hero, Alex, is an antiques dealer / archaeologist – and some might say grave robber – because he often launches his own expeditions in search of new relics to sell. The setting is so far in the future that the antiquities Alex deals with are also futuristic to the reader, like artifacts from interstellar space missions, or from other planets. In A Talent for War, Alex inherits a mysterious project from his late uncle, a true archaeologist killed in a space travel accident. The project has to do with the events and major players of an important war between humans and an alien species, that took place a few hundred years before his time. His uncle seems to have found information that could challenge the history of the war that everyone accepts. Alex teams up with female pilot Chase, and together they unravel the mystery.

I liked the far-future setting, liked that the world has its own long history, not too closely tied to present-day Earth. It made it a whole new world (hah) instead of just a projection from today. I liked the conspiracy action/mystery plotline; it kept me curious about what would happen next. The pacing is good too. And I liked the war story. I especially liked the way an otherwise typical sci-fi alien war story was told in a historical perspective. It made it really interesting.

Polaris (Alex Benedict 2)

Alex and now partner Chase acquire some artifacts from the starship Polaris, which was involved in a mysterious incident: on one of its trips, when it was carrying only prominent scientists and researchers, all of the passengers disappeared without a trace. Then, the museum housing other Polaris artificacts is bombed, and suspicious people start visiting the clients who bought Alex’s artifacts. Alex and Chase start to investigate what really happened during the Polaris incident, and the process leads them into a lot of danger.

Polaris is told from Chase’s first-person person perspective, whereas Talent for War was told from Alex’s. The story has a lot more traditional action: lives in danger, ship sabotage, ‘car’ chases. But the Polaris incident is less interesting than the war story, partly because it is more outlandish and supernatural. The ending surprised me, and it was a bit of a strain on my suspension of disbelief, but the story was so fun overall that I let it go.

Seeker (Alex Benedict 3)

Seeker won the Nebula Award, but I actually didn’t like it as much as I liked the first two Alex Benedict books. It has a similar format – Alex and Chase follow an antiquities lead that gets them involved in a historical unsolved mystery. This time though, the historical mystery is a lost colony. The starship Seeker took a bunch of settlers in search of freedom and a new world; but the settlers were never heard from again. When Alex by chance acquires an artifact that may have come from Seeker, he goes looking for it, and in the process finds out what really happened to that lost colony.

The main reason I didn’t like it was that this time, the historical mystery was set relatively close to present-day. So, the history story had a lot more speculation and commentary on today’s world. Unfortunately, this detracted from the story about what happened to the colony. Also, since the speculation wasn’t given that much air-time, I thought it was a little underdeveloped and had a hard time believing some of the speculated events.

Engines of God (Engines of God 1)

The universe in Engines of God has relatively few habitable planets. Of these, only one has intelligent alien life on it. The others have only alien artifacts and ruins; the intelligent species behind them are extinct. Engines of God opens with a team of archaeologists hurrying to complete an excavation on an alien planet before Earth’s government starts terraforming it, a process that will destroy all existing life and artifacts. They finish their work at the cost of lives, but the information they recover leads to a unifying link among previously mysterious ruins built on moons near habitable planets.

I thought Engines of God was okay, but I don’t want to read any more books in the series. The story was good, albeit pretty slow-moving, but I didn’t like the main character, Hutch. She seemed meant to be a tough, independent, heroic female protagonist, but she wasn’t actually. In fact, she was often sort of melodramatic.

Infinity Beach

In the universe of this book, humans have yet to discover ANY intelligent life, and most believe that it doesn’t exist. The protagonist Kim has a sister, Emily, who mysteriously disappeared when Kim was young. Emily had dedicated her life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and Kim suspects she might have found it before her disappearance. Kim and her friend Solly risk their careers and their lives to discover what really happened.

Infinity Beach was also kind of slow moving.  The story is interesting as usual, but it felt bogged down by lectures about the inspirational nature of exploration. It seemed like there were too many of these.