Alien invasion stories are always a lot of fun so when I read about Out Of The Dark by David Weber in a story about upcoming books for September on one of my favorite Sci-Fi blogs, io9.com, I was interested. So after I finished Acclerando I popped right on the Kobo store and bought Out Of The Dark. Now that I’ve finished it I sorta feel like I wasted my money…

The book opens as a group of aliens, the Galactic Hegemony, spy on Earth in the 1400′s, specifically they watch Henry the Fifth as he slaughters the French at the Battle of Agincourt. As a group of creatures descended from herbivores they are horrified by the actions that humans are committing against each other. They resolve that something should be done about the humans lest they become like the only other warlike species they’ve encounter: The Shongari.

We jump forward to the 21st century and the Shongari are approaching earth ready for a colonizing invasion. They find a much more advanced human race – apparently we advance a lot quicker then everyone else in the galaxy – but decide to invade us anyway. From here it proceeds much like you’d expect an invasion story to go. They bombard the planet and wipe out our infrastructure and kill our leaders and we’re reduced to guerilla warfare to try and beat them. The Shongari take a serious beating but in the end it looks like they’re going to get the upper hand, then Weber pulls the crazies twist out of his butt that he could have.

Don’t get me wrong, I like twists, they can be awesome. Sadly this twist reeks of Weber painting himself into a corner and having no other way for there to be any sort of ‘happy ending’. There is no happy ending here simply because of the sheer weakness of what’s written. It’s sad when you figure out whats going on, you spend a chapter or two hoping that you’re wrong, but you’re not. The entire novel wraps up in a single chapter. The powerful, if somewhat hapless, Shongari are defeated in as little as two paragraphs. It’s a real let down.

If you stop around chapter 35 and make up your own ending you’ll like this novel a whole lot more. For most of the book it’s worth reading but the end will leave you frustrated. Don’t buy this book right now, when it comes down to $6 or so, or if you find it second hand, it might be worth it if you have nothing better to do.

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Out Of The Dark

This is the hardest review I’ve had to write to date! Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of the most insane books I’ve ever read, and I find myself setting here grasping at a way to properly describe it. The book is written as a collection of 9 separate, but heavily connected, short stories dealing with three generations of the Macx family, from early in the 21st century to the end and beyond and explores the repercussions of humianity finally hitting the ‘technological singularity’, the time when the rapid advancement of technology changes the world we live in so much that it’s almost unrecognizable to past generations.

Normally I’d go though a plot outline but it’s hard to do in this case, we start with Manfred, the patriarc of the family as he travels Europe in the 21st century spreading his ideas freely and ‘living 30 seconds in the future’ as he describes it. Then he gets a phone call from some lobsters and it gets real weird. This book moves a mile a minute for the first 3 sections and if you can’t keep up it’ll lose you real fast. There’s a thousand pieces of technological jargon and even more confusing ideas spewed in these chapters that’ll make your head spin if you’re not already deep in into this sort of thing it’ll leave you scratching your head and re-reading whole pages.

From there it slows down a little and we get the story of Manfred’s daughter Amber as she escapes her ‘crazy’ mother Pam by  venturing off to the moons of Jupiter. It’s becomes more standard sci-fi fare as Amber and the family cat (now a massively powerful AI, later a ‘weakly godlike intelligence’) decode and alien signal and find a router that’ll give them access to the galactic ‘Internet’.  They do this by uploading their ‘state vectors’ to a tiny space ship and launching copies of themselves to the router several light years away. The flesh copies stay home.

The final section deals with Amber’s son Sirhan who’s been mostly raised on his own after the living copies of his parents either die or move away. He’s now living of Saturn with refugees of the inner solar system who’ve been displaced by the Vile Offspring, a huge number of weakly godlike intelligences who are dismantling the inner solar system as part of a project to turn all the matter in the solar system into ‘computronium’, or smart matter, to host a massive computer to run their minds. We’re past the singularity and the world is very different place for the surviving humans. They must now, however, escape what they have made.

As I said, this book is insane, however, it is very well written and the characters come alive as you follow their experiences thought he future of the human race. Stross was a computer programmer (and so am I) and you can really see the influence of our current emerging technologies in his writing. Computers progress from wearable personal area networks, to full neural interfaces, to whole mind uploading thought the course of the novel and Stross paints a very concise picture of where he thinks the future lies. The pace of the novel is as fast as Stross predicts our technological advance and as I said before can lose you if you’re not already in a technological mindset going in. This probably isn’t a book for people who aren’t computer nerds but if you are you’ll enjoy it immensely as it doesn’t try to dumb anything down.

As an added bonus, Accelerando can be downloaded for free from Stross’s website.

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Accelerando

P.S.: Warning, if you Google ‘Accelerando’ you’re going to get a bunch of Japanese animated porn…just a heads up.

This was another book that my Education class was centered around as an example of teaching literature (and history) to adolescents.   It’s the first graphic novel I’ve read, the closest I’d come before being the Archie cartoons I read as a teenager.    When I mentioned to my husband that this was required reading for my course he was pleasantly surprised (it seemed, surprised for him is rather low key) that he had read it and enjoyed it.

Basically, the graphic novel follows Art as he interviews his father about his life during World War II, including fighting in the Polish army, meeting his mother, running from Nazi’s and life in an internment camp.

The book is drawn completely in black and white, and the ‘races’ are represented by animals; most noticeably the Jewish were mice and the Nazis were cats.    The polish characters were pigs, and the main characters were hiding and disguising themselves as polish, they wore pig masks.   It was really quite cleverly done, because it took me a while to discover that this what they were doing.  What this represented to me, is how there was no real noticeable distinction between races, if you weren’t looking for it.

The drawings were very clever, and packed full of symbolism that the average teenage reader might not see or understand.   The dialog was uniquely authentic and the voice of the father was very clear in my mind.  His character and story are nicely colored by the vignettes  of present life, in particularity his relationship with his new wife and son, and his attitudes towards money.

In short, this is an amazingly written and drawn graphic novel, rich in history, symbolism and culture that would be ideal for teaching students the history of the holocaust in a way that they will be able to identify with, and which will keep their attention.   I would definitely consider using this in the classroom, and it opened my mind to the possibility of using graphic novels, in general, as a teaching aid.

My own personal feelings of the graphic novel aren’t as positive, however.   While I fully realize and appreciate the value of the graphic novel, I can’t say that I actually enjoyed reading one.   The structure just doesn’t work for my mind; I kept getting tripped up by the occasional uneven panels, and most of the time I didn’t notice a lot of the graphics, just sticking to the dialog.   I wasn’t a big fan of the black and white method of this particular graphic novel, either, though I understand it creates a feeling of authenticity. This is simply my own deficiency, being a very quick reader of novels, and being used to creating universes in my mind through descriptive text, instead of having the picture drawn for me.

What it comes down to is I recommend teachers use this novel in their classrooms, and that lovers of graphic novels pick this up for themselves.    You can find it here:  Maus: A Survivors Tale