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.

***

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.

***

Accelerando

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

Another of my favorite works of cyberpunk fiction is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Originally published in 1992 Stephenson envisions a 21st century that where the government of the United States has finally ceded all authority to capitalism and the country is now ruled by massive corporations. People live in ‘burbclaves, gated and guarded suburban towns run by corporations that hold their own sovereignty, such as ‘Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong’. Everything, right down to the roads, are run by the corporations that constantly compete for consumers. The US government has been reduced to nothing but a worthless bureaucracy shuffling papers around and wallowing in their own outdated processes.

The novel starts as we meet our main character, the stunningly aptly named Hiro Protagonist, freelance hacker, pizza delivery driver for one of the Mafia run pizza chains, part-time secret agent, and self-proclaimed best swordsman in the universe. Hiro is one of the original programmers of the Metaverse, a virtual reality system that has supplanted the Internet in the future. People jack in and can live out fantasy lives in rendered reality, you can be anything you want to be in the Metaverse as long as you have the money.

Our secondary main character is a streetwise skateboard courier named Y.T. (you don’t find out till well into the book what this stands for and I’m always a little let down that it wasn’t something cooler). Using an electromagnetic harpoon she attaches herself to cars and surfs the traffic to make her deliveries on time.

Together they stumble on a sinister new street drug that is usable both in real life and in the Metaverse called ‘Snow Crash’. Not only just a drug but a computer virus that can infect a persons brain that’s being distributed by a church, franchise of The Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates of course. Behind this stands one of the most powerful men on earth, L. Ron Rife (his name a dig at L. Ron Hubbard who also started a crazy religion). This is where it all starts to get a little weird and existential. The drug is a mimetic/biolinguistic virus created by the Sumerian goddess Asherah and defeated by an ancient neuro-linguistic hacker named Enki. Rife has discovered this virus, and it’s antidote, and is using it to his own ends to control humanity. Hiro is contacted by an ex-girlfriend who’s now deep in Rife’s organization to help stop him. Along the way we meet many interesting characters and Stephenson introduces us to many strange and thought provoking concepts.

Snow Crash, like all of Stephenson’s books can be a bit of a daunting read and you really have to read it a couple of times to get what’s going on. There’s a lot of deep and complex theories about the history of language and the idea of neuro-linguistic hacking and the ability to program the human brain like a computer. As a full-time computer programmer the ideas presented are intriguing, but if you’re not a technical person it could take some time to really get though this book. None the less it is a fun ride and a look at what the future could become if we let the corporations have too much power.

***

Snow Crash

Dune is a book that leaves you wanting more and Frank Hurbert understood this but it still took him four years after Dune’s publication to release the first sequel in what would become a trilogy, Dune Messiah.

Dune Messiah opens twelve years after the thrilling conclusion to Dune and Paul is now emperor of the galaxy and the jihad he saw before him in the first book has come to pass. His Fremen warriors have rampaged across the galaxy imposing their Fremen religion on all the worlds of the empire and proclaimed Maud’dib a living god. While Paul is the greatest power in the galaxy he is unable to stop what has been done in his name and sixy-one billion have perished at the hands of his regime.

Meanwhile, Alia has grown to the edge of adulthood and leads the church from atop her massive palace in the heart of Arakeen. Behind all this a conspiracy is growing with the Bene Gesseret plotting with the Spacing Guild to assassinate Paul and wrest control of the spice away from him. With the help of a Tleilaxu face dancer and the revived body of Duncan Idaho, how a gohla named ‘Hayt’, they launch a plot against him.

Dune Messiah is very much like The Empire Strikes Back, it’s a series of down notes. Paul is trapped into a future he knows with utter perfection, and hates, but is unable to change it. Throughout the story he loses everyone close to him and ultimately himself. His government is corrupt, the Fremen are getting water-fat and rich off the back of a vicious jihad that has reached a fevered pitch and there’s no end in sight. At the end of the novel we get the one bright spot, the birth of Paul’s children (although even this is surrounded by sorrow) and the hope for a new future of the empire.

This novel takes a lot of flack for being too much of a downer, but I think it works as a good counter-point to Dune, in that book we saw the glorious rise of Paul and in this one we see the shame of a foundation that that rise was built upon, he’s not the supreme being we thought he was he can merely see the future he’s trapped into. At only half the length of Dune this is a quick read but still quite satisfying. It’s a great bridge into the next novel in the original trilogy Children of Dune.

Pick it up, enjoy it.

***

Dune Messiah

I’ve mentioned before, in my post of favorite Canadian authors, that I really enjoy Margaret Atwood’s work.  So, when I saw this book on the shelf, (it instantly caught my attention by the cover) I very nearly bought it right then, before remembering I have an ereader and rushing home to buy it on the computer.

The synopsis given on the back, and that Kobo books gives it, just doesn’t do the novel justice.   On the surface The Year of the Flood is the stories of two women as they live the final years up to and beyond the destruction of man kind, in a religious-environmental cult called God’s Gardeners, who have predicted the end of mankind in a ‘waterless flood’.

Ren’s story, told in first person, covers her childhood growing up with the gardners and how she ends up working for Scales and Tales, a sexclub run by Seksmart, where she dances and works the trapeze.   Toby’s story, told in third person, starts with the death of her mother and suicide of her father, and her subsequent flight from the compound and disappearance into the exfernal world, where she works for Secretburger (the secret is what meat is in the burger). She is physically and sexually abused by the manager, a violent monster with high connections, before being rescued by the gardeners.  Their stories intersect when Toby becomes a teacher for the gardeners children, including Ren.

Most of the novel is spent on the women’s past stories, but the chapters jump back and forth between current events in Year 25 (of the Gardeners), and the years that have past until the women meet up again.  At this point the story moves forward as the two women travel together, through a post apocalyptic world,  and meet up with people they knew from their days with the Gardeners.

Beyond the story, Atwood creates a marvelously descriptive and complex religious structure for the Gardeners, based around chapters of sermons given by Adam One, the leader, and songs from the ‘oral hymbook’.   In the beginning of the novel, these sections seem quaint, but not significant to the story, so it was tempting just to skim through the sermon and skip the songs.  However, as time goes on, these sermons reveal the life of the Gardners and their hardships, including sermons after they are persecuted and forced to flee their garden.  The sermons after the Flood are particularity poignant as the reader is shown that most of the Gardeners have died in their flight.  In the end, Adam One has little hope of their survival, however maintains his beatific devotion to God and God’s purpose.   These segments beg the question of if this book is actually a religious commentary on the state of the world, where it is headed and the power we have to change a possibly bleak future.

I was so surprised and disappointed when this novel ended that I had to go back (remember I’m on an ereader that doesn’t tell me how many pages are left) and make sure that I hadn’t hit a wrong button and missed entire chapters some how.    The ending was left hanging in such a way that it begs for a sequel.   I want to know what happens to Toby, Amanda, Ren and Jimmy.  I want to see what happens with the new world.

Desperate for answers I went to Amazon looking for any word of sequels, only to find that The Year of the Food is the sequel; sort of.  According to  Margaret Atwood’s own words on the novel, she wrote this novel because so many people asked her what happened after her previous novel, Oryx and Crake, the story of Jimmy and Glen at the end of the world.  Well, now I have to go read that one!

The reason that this novel is so good is because it seems so simple, but is amazingly heartfelt and complex.  The societal and economical structure of the world, along with varying beliefs and morals create an incredible mixture of culture under the surface of ordinary lives of seemingly simple yet extraordinary characters.  It was a pleasure to read.

You can find it here:   The Year of the Flood

Since my husband is fresh out of short story ideas,  I took pity of him and opened up my writing file.   The only thing I felt was really worth posting (a lot of my stuff sucks, apparently), was this story that I started three or more years ago and never finished, until now, although I still feel that there’s more story in it.    It’s based on a character that I played in the mmorpg Eve Online, and takes place in the Eve universe.    This is almost my first attempt at writing science fiction.

****

My name is Kyrana. My last name isn’t important, well unless you’re my parents or relatives or the entire Gallente federation. I am the only daughter of the ruling house of the Gallente people – the Gallente’s being one of the first houses to colonize Eve, a galaxy cut off from Solaris and Earth by a collapsed wormhole. The Archivists say that we’re decedents of Earth’s French people, whatever that means.

Anyway, like I said, I am the only daughter of the ruling house of Gallente. I have two older brothers, both being raised and prepared to run Gallente space when my parents choose not be cloned any longer. My job as the only daughter, is to get married. Rumor has it that they want me married to a Caldari, to bring the two peoples closer together and ease tensions between them.

I did go to school, however, to gain some basic skills to help me do what was required of me. It wasn’t the school that my parents picked for me. The Federal Navy Academy isn’t exactly a charm school. That’s where things went wrong, for my parents at least. I fell in love with flying. I loved being in a pod and connected to a ship. My mother, a properly raised Gallente Lady, was understandably horrified. Understandably, because a real “lady” should never want to immerse herself in biogenic goo and hardwire her body to the computer of a ship.

They could have lived with that, though. They could see it being an amusing hobby, and useful if it really came down to it. What they really objected to were the people I met and the friends I made. Especially men. For someone who is to marry in order to unite two peoples, meeting men is frowned upon. Unless, of course, they are politically influential.

The day I graduated from the Academy and was given my first ship, a rookie ship called a Velator, was one of the best days of my life. I had at my fingertips, well directly connected to my brain, actually, the means to my freedom; to a life I could create for myself without anyone else telling me what was right, or proper, or my duty.

I spent the next month flying around Gallente space, doing courier missions for agents, running training complexes and training up skills, until I had enough ISK to buy and insure my very first frigate, my Tristan. By then, the thrill of the kill…chasing down pirates had gotten into my blood and I started to do kill missions for agents and hunt down pirates in the astroid belts.

It didn’t take long before that wasn’t enough for me, and I wanted more than I could handle on my own. I needed a corp. I got lucky when I found one that was taking graduates, usually they aren’t willing to train, and hire only based on experience, skill and implants. Sometimes you can buy your way into them. So, I started out in the Carbide Industries Initiate Academy, and I was trained by a Caldari named Xeserox. He was a veteran of low sec space, and fought in two wars. He was loyal, tough, and I’d become accustomed to asking how high, when he said jump.

Like today. I was sleeping in the hangar when an emergency broadcast went out across all ships belonging to the corp. It was an Urgent message for all ships to respond to a 0.0 section of space. That’s as low security as you can get – no gate guns, pirates guaranteed to jump you and nearly everyone’s a wanted criminal. I don’t go below 0.5 security, because as much as I love the thrill of the hunt and the kill, I’m not stupid and I don’t want to be cloned. I like my original body, so I avoid it. They call me a Care Bear. Yeah, I talk tough, but when the hunt gets truly dangerous I get nervous.

Coordinates were immediately provided, and a quick check at the nav-map showed that it was only ten jumps away from my current headquarters at the Atari II space station. My mind hovered over the launch command, hesitating, and I could feel my heart pounding and my respiration beginning to climb. “Anyone know what’s going on?” I sent over the comm line.

“Command demands radio silence” was the instant response, flashing red in front of my eyes. “Just get your ass to the coordinates.”

With a deep breath, and a thought, I sent the signal to open hangar gates and nudged my ship outside, hovering in the protective bubble of its shields. To my left, an identical pair of doors opened and a familiar ship slid into view, accelerated and was gone before I could blink. Green text floated in my field of vision, and I could almost hear the half laughing, half gloating voice of Valeria, “Common Kyr, lets kill something! Meet you at the gate!”

That got me moving. In an instant, coordinates to the low sec space were imputed into my nav-computer, and I was flying through space and jumping through gates. There is no way to describe the ecstasy of symbiosis with the power of a ship. I can only imagine that this is what the birds back on Gallente feel like, as they race across the sky; their bodies soaring, turning on a dime, diving for prey. My entire body thrumbed with power, eager for release; shooting at something was nearly orgasmic.

It was very easy to see how people could go rogue or turn into pirates, getting pleasure out of hunting down and destroying other ships. The only difference between them and me was that I still had a conscience.

The next thing I knew I was hovering at the last gate in safe space. I still felt super charged, as if pumped full of electricity, but on top of it all I felt like I had been drenched in ice water. If I went through this gate, I could die. Valeria was already gone, and radio silence meant I couldn’t contact her. Blips on my map showed that corp members were amassed in space three jumps away, so close that I could almost reach out and touch them…and yet…

“Xeserox?” I silently messaged, praying for an answer.

“Sup?” he blinked back, “are you on the way?”

“Umm…” my hesitation translated itself on the screen.

“We need everyone we can get, Kyr, you can do this. I trained you to do it, now get your ass in here.”

“Yes sir!” I responded, closing the chat. Then I jumped.

As difficult as it is to describe the sensation of being melded to your ship, jumping is even more so, yet completely different. It’s kinda like, when your hand falls asleep and you get pins and needles, except it’s all over your body and you feel like it’s gonna tear it apart. Then, just when you can’t stand it anymore, you’re at the other gate. It always takes a little while to orient yourself, and for your computer to get a bead on what’s in the area. This is the most dangerous part of flight, especially in low sec space, with no military protection or turret guns to target high bounty ships.

So, when I could see again, and realized I was still I alive, I took a deep breath of relief and then ran like hell to the next gate. They can’t shoot you when you’re on route. It’s the only way to get away from a pirate that’s after you. If you drop out of hyperspace half way between destinations, you might get lucky and lose them, but otherwise you run from planet to planet, until you find a station you can hide in. Then you hope they go away.

Xeserox told me, once, that I shouldn’t worry so much about being shot down. “You’ll always clone back” he said, “no big deal. So you lose a few implants, but you’re not gonna die, at least, not permanently.” I always told him it’s not myself I worry about, it’s my ship. I don’t wanna lose my ship. I’m not sure how honest I was being.

So, after all my imaginings of being blown to smithereens, imagine my surprise when I jumped into the last gate in 0.0 space, as listed on my coordinates, to be met with nothing but debris. There were canisters all over the place; a quick scan showed they were full of weapons, ammo and some ore. There was nothing on my screen, no friendlies and no blinking, beeping read dots, thankfully. “What the hell?” I said to myself, rotating on the spot, checking the space around me for anything I missed. “Do I have the right coordinates? Maybe I’m at the wrong gate.”

“Hey, guys?” I sent out a message, “is the radio silence still on? I”m at the coordinates and there’s nothing here.”

Silence.

“Hello?” I send out again.

“Kyrana! RUN!” The words flashed bright in my vision just as a wave of ships materialized right above my head, from the gate. They were all blinking red.

I gunned up my engines and made a desperate run for the gate, keying the launch sequence, praying no one had seen me. There was a flash of light, a hot red rush of energy and the feeling of pins and needles, only multiplied to the point that I felt a scream rip out of my throat, only to be enveloped in complete, sensory deprivation blackness.

I don’t know how long it took to recover, but I do know that “Shit,”was the first word I spoke in my new body, back in Gallente. My mother was not impressed.

Today we review a 115 year old book, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Written in 1895 it was one of the first works to explore the idea of time travel.  It’s told from the point of view of a friend of the main character, identified only as The Time Traveller, who is retelling the story at a later date (presumably to the reader).

The story opens with a group of friends gathering at The Time Traveller’s house where The Time Traveller is detailing his ideas on time travel to his friends. He then wows the assembled group by producing a small model of the machine he has devised and sends it winging off though time. The following week the group gathers together again only to find The Time Traveller late for dinner, when he does finally emerge from his workshop he’s disheveled and has an amazing story to tell.

The Time Traveler details his travels far forward in time to the year 802,701 where he’s found humanity has evolved into a two separate races, a peaceful and happy race of stunted surface dwellers called the Eoli and a deformed race of underground cannibals called the Morlocks. The Time Traveler theorizes that humanity has ended up in this state due to technological advancement that allowed the people of the surface world to live an ‘toil-free’ existance while the underground workers kept their surface machines alive and they eventually evoloved into monsters that fed on the flesh of the Eoli.

The Morlocks steal The Time Travelers machine and he must recover it from them in a somewhat anti-climactic battle and he flings himself forward some 30 million years into the future to watch the death of the earth before he finally comes back to his workshop and relates the tale to his friends.

Since this novel, it’s quite short, a novella really, is so old the language is quite archaic but it doesn’t detract much from the story and Wells evokes powerful imagery of a far distant future. While much of what Wells describes for the future of mankind, and his ideas about how time and space work, misses the mark based on what we know about science these days his ideas are none-the-less interesting and insightful. In the end this work of fiction is a great look at both history and the origins of science fiction and a very entertaining read.

Best of all, since it’s 115 years old it’s WELL out of copyright so can be downloaded for free from all over the place. The copy I read was from Project Guetenburg and very well edited and formatted. You can grab your own copy below. Enjoy

***

The Time Machine

Last week the wife and kids and myself went to the fair. We rode the rides, saw the fireworks and ate crappy fair food. While at a stop at one of the many corn dog booths I noticed that they not accepted debit and credit cards so I elected to pay with my debit card and the terminal device that the lady handed me had a little label that read ‘Corn Dog Two’, it struck me that this might be an awesome name for a starship! As such this story was born, but don’t think we’re in for all fun and games….

****

Corn Dog Two

The boy wandered down the dusty center street of town kicking at clods of dried dirt and watching the dun colored dust swirl away ahead of him. The sun blazed white and hot in a cloudless sky and sweat beaded on the tanned skin of his forehead. The little farming town was quiet in the late afternoon, most everyone inside in the air-conditioned comfort of their homes waiting for the sun to dip lower on the horizon so they could come out and finish the work of the day. The only sounds on the street today were the boy’s feet scuffing against the dry ground and the occasional crunch of soil under the big rubber wheels of a delivery bot.

The boy stood and watched the little robots pop from the ejection port on the side of the general store for a while. They would spring out and race off to their destination, a yellow light flashing soundlessly to warn of their approach, only to return shortly after and drop into the retrieval trap to be reloaded.

The sound of its approach started as a distant pop, like a firework. The boy heard it and looked to the sky, holding one hand up to shield the unyielding sun. Like all children of the outer colonies he knew the sound of something entering the atmosphere and blasting past the sound barrier but try as he might he couldn’t find the tell-tale streak of ionized air that would accompany an off-world visitor. Dejected he kicked more dirt and moved on down Main Street.

He’d reached the big field at the edge of town when it hove into view over the horizon. It was moving fast trailing black smoke behind it and flashing with a cacophony of lights and rending the air around it with rippling heat. Like some kind of demonic rhino it blasted fire out of its nose to slow it’s forward motion, the boy stood rapt watching the thing approach. The sounds of its engines hit him first, a low rumbling that he felt in the pit of his stomach more then he heard. The deep base note ratcheted up a notch as its landing thrusters kicked in and it belched flame and more black smoke from its belly.  The boy had never seen a starship this close, he was awed by it, wide and fat with stubble little wings on either side of it, and the whole big rusty body of the thing was covered by flashing multi-colored lights that blazed even in the omnipresent sunlight. As it came closer and closer to the town it fired more and more thrusters to control itself, each now blasting the boy with a hot wind and bits of earth, despite this he stood his ground and watched, mouth agape as the massive ship slowly orbited the field.

With a sound like hell opening the belly of the beastly ship split, unseen wheels and gears screeching and clanking, to reveal a strange assortment of cubes of all different sizes. As it slowly orbited the field it began dropping the cubes in a pattern the boy couldn’t grasp. Each cube trailed a long cable back to the ship that unraveled from somewhere deep inside. It kept this up until all the cubes had been deposited into the field and it looked to the boy like some strange maze had been setup. The ship hung for a moment, a massive squid trailing more than a hundred black tentacles from its belly, and then slowly slipped behind the strange maze it had created and extended wide landing struts that it settled onto with a wheeze that reminded the boy of his grandfather.

The air was suddenly dramatically quiet again as the ship powered down, nothing could be heard but the sound of the wind and the ticking of the metal as the ship cooled. So quite that when the ship thumped open another set of panels the sound of it made the boy jump half a meter off the ground. A long fence was run out of the ship to enclose the entire field of cubes, the two halves meeting in what the boy was sure was a ticket booth. What happened next was even more astounding as the field of cubes suddenly turned into a field of flowers. Each cube was blossoming open, panels folding back and out and revealing what they held inside. Some were larger structures that began assembling themselves, long arms with pods on the ends, covered in more lights. Massive wheels propped in the air painted in dazzling colors with brilliant signs. Smaller cubes opened to expose expanses of games and prize racks.

“Oh wow!” the boy said to himself, “the carnival’s in town!”

That evening as the sun hung low on horizon the field outside of town blazed with light. Rides whirled in the sky and the carnies called from their games to the meager townsfolk who came out to see the attractions. The children’s screams of delight filled the air as they rode the thrill rides and the boy begged his parents for a few Imperial credits to ride the rides and play the games. The boy wandered the aisles of games watching the people of his town try and win prizes; he finally selected a game he figured he could win. They’d set up three empty bottles and you had to knock them down with a ball. He’s always had good aim and was the best pitcher on his ultra-ball team.

“Oh boy, here comes a ringer.” said the girl who ran the game, eyeing him up dramatically and giving him a sly wink. She was tall and rail thin with spiky blue hair that jutted from her head at all angles. She tossed a ball lazily in her hand as the boy approached.

“Just two credits for three balls.” She said cocking a grin at the boy, “knock down all three and you can win that lovely Imperial Yacht model up there, it’s an exact 1:50 scale replica of the Emperors own!”

The model was spectacular; the boy had never seen anything like it. He could make out all the individual windows, and under the massive mid-ship dome he was sure he could see the artificial rainforest inside.

“Okay, I’ll give it a shot.” He pulled a grubby ident card from his pocket and ran it through the little reader on the side of the game, it gave is static filled beep to let him know he had enough money and the spiky haired girl handed over the balls.

“Good luck” she winked at him again.

His first throw was wide and just grazed the top bottle making it waver a little but it didn’t fall.

“Oooh, so close!” the carnie said with mock suspense in her voice. The boy blocked her out and concentrated on the bottles. He threw with all his might and hit the top bottle square in the center but to his dismay the lower two didn’t budge.

“Almost got it kiddo!”

Taking a deep breath and steadying himself the boy threw again, it was a perfect shot right between the lower bottles. Both spun around and the left hand side one tipped and fell over. The right side bottle leaned, and leaned, the boy held his breath, willed with all his might for it fall over but it fell back on to its base, shuddered and remained standing.

“What?!” The boy yelled in indignation.

“Ohh, sorry kid, but here, you win this.” She handed him a stuffed creature.

“What’s this?” The boy asked.

“Outter Banks Mutant spider. Cute isn’t it?”

“Let me try again.” The boy swiped his card and the tinny speaker beeped at him again and the girl handed over the balls.

“Sure thing kiddo, win another small and I can upgrade you to a medium!”

“I want that ship.”

But try as he might the result was the same. The last bottle wouldn’t fall and the girl replaced his stuffed toy with a slightly larger and equally as foreign one.

“Thems the breaks kid.” She shrugged her shoulders at him as he stared disgustedly at his prize.

“This game is rigged!” he pointed his finger at the offending bottle, “I should call the Inquisitors down here to shut you down!”

“Now, now son.” A voice said from behind the boy, “Let’s not be rash. Corn Dog Two runs honest games.” The boy turned to look at who spoke. Behind him stood a short man in a bright red coat that reflected an iridescent haze around him. He had greasy black hair slicked to the side over a pallid face.  Bushy eyebrows shaded beady eyes that narrowed as the boy scowled at him. A pencil thin moustache was set over a set of livery lips that looked just a touch too wet for the dry air.

“And besides,” he continued, “we both know the Inquisitors don’t bother with these outer rim worlds.” He favored the girl running the game with a wink and the boy didn’t notice how she shrunk back from him and refused to meet his gaze.

“They sure do, just last month my uncle called in….”

“Oh yes, I’m sure a Brother and Sister will pop right up at your call, but like I said Corn Dog Two runs honest games. We’ll submit to any scrutiny.” The greasy man said tucking his thumbs into his belt and challenging the boy to try again.

“You’ll see I’ll… wait… what the heck is a Corn Dog Two?” The boy asked knitting his eyebrows together in puzzlement.

“Why that’s my ship of course!” The man swept his arm in the direction of the hulking mass of metal that sat just behind the fair.

“Your ship?” The boy swallowed hard, a real live ship captain standing before him!

“Of course. I am Thaddeus Jacob Schwartz bin El Hajjib, operator of Corn Dog Two and master carnival promoter.”  He took a deep bow and continued.

“I travel with my band of loyal carnies from star to star bringing joy to children and adults across the galaxy.” He whirled around and wrapped an arm around the girl, “Isn’t that right Gauge?”

“Yessir!” She yelped with a wan smile on her face. The boy was too young to read the fear in her eyes and he never noticed the device she worn on her ankle.

“Wow.” The boy said quietly. “A real starship. What happened to Corn Dog One?” he asked.

“Ha! An observant one this. Well,” the man leaned close and spoke in a low conspiratorial tone, “some say she still travels the stars full of the ghosts of dead carnies, others say she crashed into a star when her navigator forgot to take his shots before launch. But you want to know the awful truth?” The boy nodded, eyes wide.

“The truth is… there never was a Corn Dog One!” The man leaned back and barked wild laughter into the sky, “I just figured it’d seem like a bigger operation if this ship was number two. Wild hey?” The boy cocked an eyebrow and nodded slowly.

“Would you like a tour?” The man leered at the boy.

“Could…could I see the control room?” He asked with hope in his voice, a vision of vast arrays of bizarre starship controls laid out before him filled his imagination.

“You bet son! I’ll show you the whole ship and we’ll forget about all this Inquisitor business alright?” he stuck out his hand to the boy.

“Okay! Deal!” The boy said with excitement and gave the man’s clammy hand a shake.

“This is going to be the adventure of a lifetime son.” Thaddeus Jacob Schwartz bin El Hajjib said as he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders.

As they walked off toward the ship the boy glanced back at the girl running the game, she had a strange sad look on her face and mouthed something at him that he thought might be “Don’t go” but before he could think about it Thaddeus started talking about the star drive and he forgot all about the look on the girls face.

A single tear drifted down her cheek as she watched them go.

***

The next morning the sun rose on an empty field, nothing left but the impressions in the dirt from the massive landing struts marked where the carnival had been. A pair of figures stood in the morning sun, their shadows running long down the rise that overlooked the dusty little town.

“They took a young boy this time Brother.” The woman said to the tall man beside her.

“Yes they did Sister, yes they did.”

Since Heather’s taste in books sucks (ha! take that!) she asked me to write up a Sunday Favorites for her today. Now, I know I said my most favorite book was I Am Legend, and that still holds true, a very very close second is Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Neuromancer is the story of a young computer hacker sometime in the not-so-distant future who’s been hired by a shadowy group of people to help ‘free’ an AI from it’s corporate imprisonment. The secret of who’s behind this group and their ultimate motives are the base of the story. Neuromancer serves as the first book in a trilogy commonly referred to as the Sprawl Trilogy but it stands alone just as well. The imagery of a future world where massive cities sprawl across the globe and powerful family run corporations run the world.

The other two books, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are excellent novels as well and both flesh out and give a satisfying ending to the saga that is began in Neuromancer. The only down side to the remaining novels is that you lose a few of the most entertaining characters from the first book when you start venturing down the second and third but don’t let that stop you from finding out the rest of the story.

I don’t exactly recall when I first read Neuromancer but it was probably about 12 years or so ago. It was the first ‘cyberpunk’ book I ever read and it ignited a passion in me for the genre. For years cyberpunk style novels have made up the base of my reading, from Snow Crash to Altered Carbon I’ve devoured everything I could find in the genre. In addition to just getting me into cyberpunk this novel brought me back to reading in general. Before I read Neuromancer I hadn’t read a novel in some time. My wife (girlfriend at the time) of course read all the time but I didn’t read much. I read a lot of fantasy novel as a young teenager and got burned out on them early in high school, combined with the teenage apathy for any sort of intellectual pursuit it was a number of years before I picked something up again. After reading Gibsons preeminent work of cyberpunk fiction however it sparked something in me that made me eat up as much sci-fi as I could, and it still continues to this day.

All this combines to make Neuromancer one of my favorites.

Once up on a time in a land far away there lived a little girl who loved to dance. She danced wherever she went, and she even danced in her dreams when she was sleeping. The only problem with dancing all the time was it made everything very hard to do. Dancing while you ate made a very big mess, and dancing while you dressed made putting socks on take a very long time. Dancing while in school got her in trouble more than once. She often thought that what she really needed was a world where everyone danced and always had danced, that way she and everyone else would be used to dancing all the time and would just know how to dance in bed without falling out at night.

Now, this girl, besides being a very enthusiastic dancer, was also very smart and very determined. The idea of a world where everyone danced seemed like a very good idea, and the more she thought of it the more she figured that such a place must actually exist, she just needed a way to find it. So every day after she came home from school she would sit in her room and draw up plans to find her dancing world. When her plans were complete she spent days making trips to stores and junk yards and borrowing from friends. She spent all the allowance that she had been saving for years for her one special thing. She figured that her project was special enough to spend it on. Now when she came home from school she would sit in her room and screw pieces together, it was like doing a really big puzzle.

Soon the day came when she had run out of pieces to put together. She sat back and looked at what she had built. It looked like a very complicated chair. It had wires and tubes and sparkly lights. She looked at her plans and looked at the chair….it seemed that she had everything right, but would it work?

Now she was nervous, she didn’t know if she wanted it to work after all. She was just a little girl, and going to a strange world did seem like it could be slightly dangerous. However, she hadn’t spent every day after school for months and nights when she should have been sleeping studying the physics of neutrons for nothing.

And so, the little girl slowly moved over to her invention and gingerly climbed up onto the seat. She turned on all the switches and turned a few dials and on the small keyboard typed in the letters D-A-N-C-E. Then she put on her goggles, (safety first!), though how well they’d protect on this maiden voyage there was no way to tell….as far as she knew she could arrive without a head. Taking a big, deep breath, the little girl grabbed the big red lever, closed her eyes, and pulled.

All of a sudden she had a sensation of falling and twirling. She was dizzy like she’d never been before; like she had done a million pirouettes without stopping. The world felt like it was tilting on it’s side, and she felt like it would fling her into the dark void of space. Then, with a sickening lurch everything righted itself. She was still again and the dizziness began so subside. She began to panic because it was so dark, but then she realized she still had her eyes squeezed tightly shut. With a nervous laugh at her bravery, or lack thereof, she very slowly opened her eyes.

The world looked exactly how she left it. She was sitting in her chair and her chair was sitting in her room. Her dancing posters were still on her wall, her dancing clothes were still in her closet, her dancing music was still playing on her pink music player (with ballerinas on it). Nothing appeared to have changed. Fighting a wave of overwhelming disappointment, the little girl climbed out of her chair and waltzed over to her plans to try to discover just what she had done wrong. She just didn’t understand, it felt like it had worked, so what had happened?

Like all little girls, this girl thought better with milk and cookies in her hand, so she opened her door and rumbaed into the kitchen. With a couple twirls and plies she had managed to get the cookies out of the cupboard and the milk out of the fridge and into a glass much easier than she normally would have. She didn’t even spill a drop. Thinking only that she was finally getting the hang of this dancing while doing thing, she tangoed over to the window and stood gazing out, brooding over her problem.

It wasn’t until she saw the mail man two stepping up to the mail box that she began to think that something was a little odd. Jazz stepping out the door she gazed around the neighborhood. The neighbor was leaping while watering his flowers, people driving their cars were grooving to their radios, the woman walking her poodle had apparently taught him how to do the Macarena. Not only that, but everything in the neighborhood, and even her house, she now noticed, was subtly different. It was like the world was designed for dancers. Dancing back into her house and around the living room she discovered that she no longer knocked her toes on the end tables, or her hands on the lamp shades, everything was arranged just perfectly.

Completely stunned and amazed the girl glided back to her room and stood staring at her machine. She did it, she actually did it! And the world she was presented with wasn’t some strange menace. How could dance be horrible after all? Then she began to think again. If she could create a world centered around dance, what other worlds could she create? She loved cats, what if the world was centered around cats? Hmmm no, she thought, there’s too much of a risk of the world being taken over by giant, pant wearing, talking cats. I love cats, but I don’t think I’d want to be one, I just don’t fancy licking my own butt to clean it. Okay, so what else? How about a world centered around the color pink! Pink was a wonderful color, and how I hardly doubt that a color could go wrong.

So, climbing back into her chair, she flicked the switches and turned the dials and on the little keyboard typed out the letters P-I-N-K. Then she put on the goggles, grabbed the lever and pulled.

She was so excited to see the results of her pink world that she forgot to be scared at all and this time her eyes were open when the twirling and tilting began. With her eyes open she wasn’t nearly as dizzy as she was before, and it was amazing what she saw. The room around her blurred as it spun faster and faster, all the colors ran together into a psychedelic rainbow. But then something odd began to happen. The colors slightly shifted the blues and greens and purples gradually fell away, and the reds started to bleed out. Before she knew it the chair stopped with a jerk, and he eyes struggled briefly to focus on the site in front of her. No color existed besides pink. There were no blues or reds or browns. There was no white or black or grey. Everything she looked at was pink. Gazing at herself in the mirror she was almost horrified to see that she was various shades of pink; from pink hair and skin and eyes, even, to pink clothes and shoes.

She ran, this time, forgetting to dance for the first time in years, to the door of her house, passing by the pink couches and barely glancing at the pink throw rugs over the pink hardwood floor. She flung open the door and was confronted with a horrible gaudy sight. Everything was shades of pink; trees, grass, sky, houses, cars, even the water the neighbor was spraying out of his hose! If felt like a big pink bubble gum bubble had exploded over the entire world. She could even imagine that she smelt bubble gum.

Eww, this is not what I could ever image, she thought. The world is not fun pink. Hurrying back to her chair she climbed aboard and switched switches and turned dials and into her little keyboard she was poised to type. But what did she want? She should try another world or just go back to the plain old boring, normal world where she just didn’t feel she fit in? Slowly she came to a realization that what she really wanted was the familiar. It wasn’t the world that wasn’t accommodating her it was her who wasn’t accommodating the world. Her hands began to type, N-O-R-M-A-L. She threw the lever, the world spun the colors blurred and and blues and reds and greens returned. When she came to a halt she sat and looked around her, with new appreciation of what she had.

Then she rolled over and opened her eyes and found she was comfortable in her bed. She was just a little girl, and she had to go to school. She jumped out of her bed and for the first time in months she walked over to her closet. Today she decided she didn’t need to wear her tutu, and put on jeans and a shirt. She walked out of her room and into the kitchen where her mom was preparing breakfast. She sat at the table and ate her eggs and drank her juice, and for the first time in months didn’t have to change again because she got food all over her clothes. Her mom stared at her like she had grown an extra head. “Are you feeling alright hunny?” she asked.

“Oh yes mom,” she replied as she grabbed her bag and left the kitchen to go wait for the bus. That day in school she didn’t get in trouble once, for dancing, and she was glad.