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Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer is another one of those authors who’s been around for quite a while, winning the Nebula and the Hugo and the Campbell award, and yet somehow I’ve never read one of his books.  But Rollback is nominated for a Hugo, and thus I have read it, and am pleased to have done so.  It tells the story of Don and Sarah Halifax, one of those rare couples that manages to stay together into their eighties, but have lived lives that were largely unexceptional in other regards.  On their 60th Wedding Anniversary, in the year 2048, the one truly exceptional thing from their life came back to throw them into turmoil.

Sarah, it turns out, is a famed SETI astronomer, a title she earns in the early part of the 21st century when she discovers the key to translating the first (and, thus far, only) alien message SETI had received.  The alien message was clear in its request for a response, but because of the signal’s origin many light years away it would take decades for any dialogue to make the round trip.  Those decades have passed, and on the Halifax’s anniversary, the second message was detected.  Unlike the first, though, it wasn’t just transmitted…this time it was encrypted in a code, a code that one eccentric, mega-rich SETI enthusiast believes can only be decoded by Sarah Halifax.

But even in the mid 21st century, eighty is old, and Sarah surely can’t have much time left.  For the mega-rich, however, there’s a new option: The Rollback procedure.  Through surgeries, cloned organ replacement, and genetic therapy, the aging process can be reversed, and the human clock reset to the mid-twenties.  Sarah agrees to the procedure, but only if her husband, Don, gets one also.  Now, to this point in my review you might have guessed that Sarah was the focus of this book, but it’s really Don’s story, as the Rollback fails…not for Don, but for Sarah.  Don finds himself transformed into a hale young man, married to a very old lady.  What does a retired film and audio editor do with a new youthful life…with his time…with his libido?  And will Sarah have the time and energy to decode the alien message before her health finally fails?

Sawyer does a very good job of addressing these questions, spinning a character drama of the level that is more often seen from mainstream fiction, using a device that only the genre could provide.  The question I kept asking myself, though, was “doesn’t this seem awfully familiar?”  There’s been a lot of excellent fiction addressing age reversal, lately, including last year’s Hugo Winner, Rainbows End, and (of course) Scalzi’s Old Man’s War novels, yet another response to the “graying” of our society (and, perhaps especially, of SF fandom?  It’s on my mind, certainly).  It’s clearly possible to do something special and original with material others have already addressed, but I’m not sure Sawyer managed to do so, here; to the point where I would say this book’s chief weakness is in its predictability.  The prose is compelling, gripping even, which is remarkable in a talky, contemplative book that lacks action sequences of any sort, but certain romanticized elements were underanalyzed, and I felt the light and hopeful ending was a poor match to the gravitas of the story overall.  This is a good book, and I will be looking to add more Sawyer to my shelves on its merits, but it will not be getting my vote for the Hugo this year.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

After an aborted hope to go last year, I will be attending Worldcon this year for the first time, and as a member of the convention will be voting on who receives this year’s Hugo Awards, something I consider an honor and a privilege.  The Last Colony is the first of the nominated novels that I read, and I will endeavor to keep reviewing them as I read them.

You may remember I was very impressed with Scalzi’s first major book on the scene, Old Man’s War.  I never managed to dig its sequel, The Ghost Brigades, out of my booklog backlog for a proper review, but it was a worthy successor, and I’d be hard pressed to point a finger at which of them I enjoyed more.  The events of The Last Colony pick up a few years down the road from The Ghost Brigades, finding our heroes Perry and Sagan (and their adopted daughter) happily settled into a mostly quiet life as minor officials in a small agrarian colonial community.  Suddenly they receive a visit from the Colonial Union military that they had thought they were done with, but they weren’t looking for more military service from the two former soldiers, they were looking for them to be the leaders of a new world.

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

In several of the corners of the internet I habituate, this book is lighting things up right now, and it’s sort of obvious why.  Here we have a book that is technically science fiction, but set close enough to present day that it’s difficult to tell (much the same as Pattern Recognition was) and leveraging that immediacy of setting to maximal effect by having the political climate and conflicts that are of urgent importance right now still relevant to its characters’ viewpoints.  It’s a book that is deeply political, and a book that embraces somewhat complicated ideas about math and computers as necessary elements of its setting and plot, but one that is written to be accessible enough to be shelved with Young Adult fiction (which is where you’ll find it if you want to acquire a copy for purchase).  It’s a book that is very clearly anti-establishment, but it’s also very directly a book about being a patriot; and how combining those two things are not only disturbingly easy right now, but that the former may be a precondition for the latter.  I think it’s safe to say that it would be getting plenty of coverage on Boing Boing even if it wasn’t written by one of that site’s contributors.  It’s targeted directly at the interests of Slashdot readers, and the political leanings of sites like the Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light even if Patrick weren’t the editor.  More importantly, though, I just finished a reread of Cryptonomicon, and this seemed like the perfect chaser to that book’s heady nerd-porn-i-ness.  Very minor spoilers follow below the cut: (more…)

Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance

Long, long ago I (somewhat glowingly) reviewed Kage Baker’s Anvil of the World, and was recommended, as having a somewhat similar style and tone, to the works of SF luminary Jack Vance. Dutifully, I picked up the omnibus collection of 4 of his novels set in the Dying Earth universe he created, Tales of the Dying Earth, but…well, I can’t write quite so glowing a review this time.

Vance’s setting is interesting enough, in concept. Presumably billions of years in the future, the Sun is dying. Mankind, the environment, and the Earth itself have been through so many traumas and evolutions that it can seem quite alien, especially as humanity’s control of its environment has advanced technologically, or psionically, or spiritually, or some combination of all of these, to the point where Magic in the traditional sense is very much in the world and readily perceived. Vance does a fascinating job presenting a world with billions of years of human history, and his environmental descriptions are almost Tolkien-esque at many points in their vivid paintings of his eerie world. Unfortunately, while I found much to admire in these books, like Tolkien I often thought his characterization and dialogue sometimes lagged far behind his other skills, although I wonder how much of that is simply the choice of stories included in this collection. (more…)

Engines of Light by Ken MacLeod

MacLeod continues to create interesting worlds filled with interesting (if not always entirely believable) characters and wildly variable political and economic systems that always manage to trend towards socialist libertarianism. And I keep reading them, and enjoying them, which may or may not tell you something about my own political leanings and/or tolerances. This trilogy of books starting with Cosmonaut Keep, bridged by Dark Light, and concluded with Engine City, is one of those rare interstellar epics where the speed of light is inviolable. Travel, then is accomplished in ships capable of essentially transforming themselves and their contents into light itself; massless and timeless, the traveler arrives at his destination in the same subjective moment as his departure, while years (or decades, or millennia) pass in the frames of reference of the worlds in between. Turns out that extra-terrestrials and their servant species have been relocating life-forms from Earth to an area on the other side of the galaxy for many millions of years, for their own reasons and without much consultation of those being moved, and the primary thrust of these books is the tale of those displaced colonists, impossibly distant in time and space from their homeworld, trying to establish balance and trade with other worlds and species. Minor spoilers (necessary to describe the setting) await you after the cut… (more…)

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

This book is sometimes hailed as one of the turning points in the Discworld novels…a pivotal step in the evolutionary process whereby fiction that was humorous but made you think is transformed into thoughtful fiction that makes you laugh. I would certainly offer it up as being so, but Pratchett also accomplishes something in this novel that is more difficult and rare than many genre authors (and fans) might admit: a time travel story done well.

Without over-complicating the story with paradoxes, Pratchett involves a character intimately in his own history in a believable fashion, and still manages to resolve the situation with almost no loose ends.  Not only does he juggle those difficulties with seemingly little effort, he still manages to invoke plot concepts both profound and accessible, addressing themes including the role of impersonal authority in law enforcement as opposed to a role of cops as individuals who are elements of the community, transparency in government, and the effectiveness of populist movements in complex societies.  And he still manages to be damn funny telling this story.

The story, after a brief memorial service, launches into Vimes chasing after one Carcer, the Discworld equivalent of Hannibal Lecter (leaving any questionable dietary choices solely to Dibbler), leading to Vimes and Carcer being involved in a magical accident propelling them back in time to the corrupt and unstable city-state on the verge of revolution that Vimes first began working in as a young, rookie copper.  He must, somehow, make sure his younger self and the rest of the Night Watch does what needs to be done in a world that’s been subtly changed by his and Carcer’s arrival.  It’s this unique device, making sure things occur as they did in his youth with the perspective of time guiding his decisions this time as to why they must occur in that fashion, that lets Pratchett explore his deeper themes so effectively, and speaks (I think) to the potential the Fantasy genre holds to explore difficult to address themes in literature.  Highly recommended, and as always with Pratchett books I recommend newcomers consult the Pratchett Reading Order Guide, although in this case I read this way out of order and still enjoyed it immensely.

The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs

I picked up the recommendation for this book from a Making Light comment thread looking for fantasy novels of a “literary” sort. Given some of the more recent discussion in that neighborhood, I’m not sure that label would be received so blithely these days, but it resulted in some excellent recommendations anyway. Unfortunately, The Face in the Frost is one of those books that, while I can’t deny the craftsmanship and quality of the work, still falls into the nebulous collection of works whose style is targeted at someone other than myself. (more…)

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Part of the reason this booklog has lain dormant so long is because troubled times in my personal life have consumed so much of my energy and drive, but part of it is because Spin was the next book in the review queue, and I just didn’t feel able to do it justice. And so, to get myself jumpstarted into writing again, I reread this book (for the first time, but what I’m certain will not be the last). By now, I’ve read all of the 2006 Hugo Best Novel Nominees, and they are all unquestionably excellent, but (IMO) likewise unquestionably, Spin (the winner of that award) is the best of their number, and one of the best books I’ve ever read. (more…)

Newton’s Wake by Ken MacLeod

Clearly subtitled “A Space Opera,” the first MacLeod book that I’ve read outside the “Fall Revolution” tells it like it is; Space Opera is the word, and the word is fun. Like Stross’ Singularity Sky, MacLeod is spinning an adventure yarn with lots of borderline silly speculative technology in a post-Singularity human-dominated galaxy consisting of occasionally outright silly extremist socio-political constructions. Newton’s Wake is peopled by powerful Glaswegian gangsters, theatrical producers whose works shake whole societies, incomprehensible and insane superhuman AIs, and a couple of misplaced folk singers from the 21st century, just to keep things at an…um, “Earthy” level…

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The Lost Steersman by Rosemary Kirstein

Many, many years ago, I was stranded somewhere dreadfully rural and had run out of reading material. At a gas station or a grocery store or someplace of that sort, I found a dismal few paperbacks and even fewer in my genres of choice. If memory serves, I bought all three of them, and two of them turned out to be worthwhile. Stith’s Redshift Rendezvous was the other one, but the book this review is connected to was Kirstein’s The Outskirter’s Secret, which (IIRC) had a typically dismal DKS cover of a medieval-ish swordswoman confronting a bloody obvious crashed satellite with a typically DKS unidentifiable expression on her face. But I still bought it, and re-read it several times for its interesting depiction of a rational-minded and strong heroine in a technologically degenerated, ecologically fascinating human settlement just beginning to figure out how the world works. Unfortunately, I could never find the book which preceded it, The Steerswoman, and so I eventually sold it.

Then, a few years ago, Koz reviewed The Steerswoman’s Road, a (then) recently published omnibus of the first two books by Kirstein (remarkable how similar his experience with The Outskirter’s Secret was), which reminded me of the book and put it on my “To Read” list. Sure enough, having both books together in one volume made the story about 10 times more coherent and interesting than just muddling through a sequel on its own, and so I added the (already available) sequel to my list, but didn’t actually pick it up and read it until earlier this year. In short, I found it pleasant and interesting, if not quite so aggressively unique as the first book(s?).

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