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

There aren’t very many movies I can think of that I watched before reading the book, usually I read a book and then the movie comes out, which I just have to see so I can compare the two.   When I first watched this movie, however, I wasn’t even aware that the novel existed.  Nonetheless, it quickly became one of my favorite movies.

I was 19  when the movie came out, in 1997,  and I was initially encouraged to watch it because Casper Van Dien was so incredibly hot as Jonny Rico, even though he was a 29 year old playing an 18 year old.  I ended up liking the movie so much because I saw it as a plausable view of the future.  Marketed to teenage audiences,  it begins with high school graduation and deals with issues such as leaving home.  It’s a coming of age story, with just enough science fiction (space travel and aliens) that any lessons to be found aren’t stifling as they’re hidden behind the action and aliens.

The society portrayed in the movie I also found interesting: Public floggings and execution  for crimes, military personnel having more privelidges, such as being able to have children.  All of these were ideas that I had flirted with in my idea of a ‘perfect society’ that could sustain itself.   I’m also a fan of how the movie presented information in a news form, as if on a computer, “Do you want to know more?”

The characters were also undeniably attractive and had honest relationships; how many of us have promised to “always be friends, no matter what”, before going out in to the world only to find that high school friendships and romance rarely survive the realities of grown life.  Add to the story a war with massive bugs, rife with heavy casualties, action and adventure and it’s a great movie!   It’s really too bad the sequels were so incredibly horrible.

Now, imagine my surprise when required reading for my Science Fiction English course in University included Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.  One of my favorite movies is a book!  I was ecstatic, because all things considered, I’ll take a good book over a good movie, any day.  Except it quickly became obvious that what I was reading was not the movie I had watched dozens of times.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein was written as a young adult fiction for boys, in 1959.  Similar to the movie, the novel follows Jonny Rico’s military career in a future where the earth is at war with the Bugs.  Unlike the movie, however, the military is better equipped with powered body armor allowing improved fire power and movement, when compared to the guns  and foot power the infantry of the movie had to rely on.

This isn’t the only difference, however.  As I was reading through the book, desperastely searching for my favorite characters and plot lines I was surprized to find that Dizzy, the strong female character of the movie, who joins Jonny in the mobile infantry, exists in the book only briefly as a male character who goes off course and has to be rescued by Jonny.  Any other female characters were completely lacking as well;  there wasn’t anything even close to a romantic back story or any love interests.

What this novel is really about is politics.  It is a commentary on society and how Heinlein envisioned politics of the future, eerily similar to my own imagined ‘perfect society’, except that my vision includes women.   In Heinlein’s predicted future, anyone who is responsible for anyone else – doctors, nurses, police, teachers, even parents – must first serve in the military for one term before given the responsibility of looking after others.  He also has a lot to say about discipline, advocating public executions and town square floggings as an incentive to prevent crime.  While all of these ideas were reflected in the movie, they acted only as setting for the plot.  In the novel, however, the plot acts as a delivery device for these ideals.

That’s not to say that this is a bad novel, because it isn’t.  Like the movie it is a coming of age story, however instead of appealing to both sexes is meant to teach young boys about the responsibilities inherent in growing up and taking their place in the world.  The way it ends demonstrates how children inherit the earth (and responsibility) from their parents, as Rico discovers his dad is alive and a new recruit under his command.

If I was to make a complaint about the novel, despite it not being what I expected and that’s the movie producer’s fault, no the author’s, its the same complaint I have with all of Heinlein’s books:  its outdated.  It’s really hard to read a book about the future when the characters behave like it’s the 50s.  I feel the same way about Stranger in a Strange Land; I could only read so much before I got tired of the mysoginist male characters.  Never the less, this is a good book, a classic even, and the politics it puts forth are intriguing.  As such, it remains one of my favorites and is my standby novel when I have nothing else to read.

You can find the movie here: Starship Troopers

and the novel here:  Starship Troopers

I first discovered Jack Whyte after reading a very satisfying trilogy, The Authurian Trilogy by  Mary Stewart, about the life of Merllin.  The series wet my appetite and left me craving more about Arthur, Merlin and the mythical world of Camelot. (Incidently, research for this post has shown me that there was a fourth book about Mordred that I never read!  I am now sorely tempted to pick up the series, again).

Now, at the same time, I had had sitting on my bookshelf a very old and faded book given to me second hand by an Aunt, which had been left over after a garage sale.   It was so faded and stained, possibly crusted in something that used to be sticky, that the appeal of picking it up and reading just wasn’t there.   Hence, when I began searching for new novels to read after finishing The Last Enchantment I was surprized to see that the first book in an even larger series was already in my library, if barely recognizable as such.

That book was The Skystone and it did more than open me up to another series about aurthur, it fueled a fire for early European history, which spread into a blaze so great, that I went on to minor history for my teaching degree.  What’s special abouot this series is that it’s more than just another tale about Aurthur, Merlin and all the other characters we’ve become familiar with.   This series is a journey back into history that is so incredibly well researched as to almost be an instruction manual.

The story starts with the history of Publius Varrus, a roman soldier in England and his experiences with the legions.  This goes as far as describing the setup of the legions, battle techniques,  weapons, the technology of the roman empire in building roads and other structures, as well as the Roman government prior to 500 a.d.  I had to admit that there were times when all of this description became a bit dry, as I really didn’t care about how many men made up a legion, or how a camp was laid out (complete with maps!).

However, the story begins to move along when Publius is nearly fatally injured and has to quit the legions.  He begins his life as an ironsmith and begins to make plans, with is friend, and former General, Caius Brittanicus for what he feels is the inevitable end of Roman occupation in England.  Spurred by rumors of his grandfather finding a piece of sky stone from which he created a small blade, Caus and Publius go on a search for more stone and discover it at the bottom of a lake. After many hears of work, he discovers how to smelt it, and from it he creates a goddess statue and calls it The Lady of the Lake.

This is just the beginning of a multi-generational saga of nine books that begins with Publius, and ends with Aurthur Pendragon, his great granddson.   Throughout the series the Aurthur story is taken out of fantasy and explained what at the time may have seem magical. Camelot (Camulod) Excalibur, Merlin and the Sword in the Stone are all explained away to make perfect sense.

While the history of the novels is the obvious attraction for me, the characters are easily likable and the reader really becomes invested in the family.  As you move through the novels you find that you develop relationships with the characters and grow old with them.  I felt real saddness and regret when characters came to the end of their lives, like I was seeing the passing of an era.

Apart from the main story of the Varrus/Brittanicus/Pendragon family in Camulod, we learn about the fall of Rome, are lead through the evolution of Christianity, and experience the fight to keep England from invading hordes, including the discovery and development of military technology.  The only part of the novels that I found slightly unbelievable was how every advancement in weapons seemed to come from Camulod.

Despite there being aspects of the novels, particularily military history,  that I occasionally found a bit long winded, this is the only series I’ve ever read that brought the myths to life.   These stories make it possible to imagine Arthur and Merlin as the really could have been in life.  It’s because of this that I have read the entire series over and over again, and why they never get old.

It’s because of this that I’ve also picked up Jack Whyte’s latest series about the Templars. While I really enjoyed the first book, Knights of the Black and White, I found the second book to be a disappointment. While it was as meticulously researched as all his others, the story wasn’t involved and interesting enough to disguise the history from being dry and boring.  I haven’t read the third book yet, however, so maybe it picks up.

You can find the Camulod Chronicles (known as the Dream Of Eagles saga in Canada), here:  Camulod Chronicles

Stephen King has been one of my favorite authors for a good number of years. It’s in my blood, when I was growing up my mom always had a Stephen King book on her nightstand so when I became a reader on my own I was naturally drawn to his work and engulfed in his Dark Tower universe. Once he finished The Dark Tower however I felt that his work was a little lost, he didn’t really seem to know what to do with himself. However, with Under the Dome King has returned to form what a massive tome filled with human drama and the supernatural that King does so amazingly well (Full disclosure however, I haven’t read Duma Key yet, I hear it’s good too).

The story opens on ‘Dome Day’ when the little Maine town of Chester’s Mill is sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. We meet Dale Barbara as he hike out of town after a violent run in with the son of the towns behind-the-scenes dictator ‘Big Jim’ Rennie. From there the story twists and turn as the townspeople learn the secrets of the dome, Big Jim tries to gain control of the town while keeping his own dark secrets, and his son goes mad. Everything culminates in a few epic chapters that will grab on to you and not allow you to set the book down until it’s all said and done.  Hang on though because you’ll lose people you came to care about, but if you’ve read any Stephen King you know this is par for the course. While the novel leaves you guessing early on about the nature of the dome there’s really no ‘big reveal’, the characters come to it naturally and it fits in well with the novel. There’s no big twist, King lays everything out there and lets your own imagination flesh everything out.

This is easily the best book Stephen King has written since he finished The Dark Tower — Cell is a close second — it may come in at over 1000 pages (paperback) but it really doesn’t feel that long. Both myself and my wife roared though it in record time and when it was done it felt like just the right length. As with all of Kings work the characters are extremely well developed and the setting is rich and colorful. You feel for these people by the end of the book and there were many points where I found myself holding my breath hoping they’d make it out okay. Under the Dome is a powerhouse of a novel by one of the greatest writers of the 20th/21st century, go buy it.

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Under the Dome

While I don’t read as much, or as voraciously, as my wife I do devour many books every year and with the recent purchase of an iPad I have a feeling that I’ll be doing a bit more reading than normal this year. As such I’ve offered to review the things I read as they tend to fall into genres that she doesn’t cover much. My reading interests tend to stay firmly in the Sci-Fi related areas but I do stray into Horror, Mystery, and good old Mainstream Fiction from time to time.

Today I’m going to take you though a trio of books that I just finished. I came to these novels by way of Wikipedia as I wandered though the listing of influential/popular ‘cyberpunk’ novels. I felt like reading something in that genre and I found Altered Carbon, a Philip K. Dick award winning novel that fell into an interesting category that they tagged as ‘Hardboiled Sci-Fi’. If you’re unfamiliar with the hardboiled genre Wikipedia describes it thus:

Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style distinguished by an unsentimental portrayal of crime, violence, and sex.

That sums up much of the style of Altered Carbon and its sequels pretty well. The depictions of criminal activities, violence and sex are all raw and unapologetic. So much so that when the main character Takeshi Kovacs has his first sexual encounter with another character I was rather shocked by the blunt and explicit language used to depict the sex acts (and there were several). If that sort of thing offends you, you’ll probably want to bail from these books right now.

Altered Carbon opens with the unceremonious death of the main character at the hands of the Harlan’s World police. This sets up several major plot devices that Morgan uses throughout these three novels. We quickly discover that the human race has both moved on to conquer the stars and in fact have conquered death as well. Everyone in this fictional universe are fitted with ‘cortical stacks’ that keep a constant backup of a person’s consciousness. As such, if you do happen to die, as long as your ‘stack’ survives you can be brought back to life in a new ‘sleeve’, the term they use for the human body (although we find out later that a person can be sleeved into much more then just another human body). As well, in the opening chapters we get some introduction to the politics of the universe. The Earth and her colonies are run by the UN Protectorate who have created a task force of super-soldiers that are trained for deep cover, constant re-sleeving, operations that seem to generally fall in the realm of overthrowing unfriendly governments. They’re called ‘Envoys’ and the mere mention of their name garners both fear and respect.

At its heart Altered Carbon is a fairly standard detective novel. Takeshi Kovacs, the hero of all these novels, is an ex-Envoy who awakens in a new body to find himself on Earth. He’s been hired, and released from prison (prison in this universe consists of simply storing your consciousness for a long period of time, I’m not sure what sort of rehabilitative effect this has and it’s never really clearly explained in the novels) by a 300+ year old man who is trying to solve the riddle of why he would have killed himself and destroyed his own stack when he knew full well he had a backup just waiting to be revived. The backup however is 48 hours old and has no idea what his motivation would have been.

The story progresses though Takeshi’s investigation and solving of the case and his interactions with the Earth police and various assassins who are out to get him. He meets and must overcome an old rival, has the aforementioned graphic sex with a couple of women, and ends up copying himself in order to win in the end. Overall, while the story has a few twists and turns, it’s the world building that held me in this novel and it’s sequels.  Morgan paints a very interesting picture of the human race once we can, if we can afford it, live forever. Earth is old, stale, and decadent in places and squalid in others.  Morgan creates strong characters that I wouldn’t exactly describe as likable but they are all compelling, no more so then Takeshi Kovacs himself.

The second novel, Broken Angels, finds our hero Takeshi Kovacs embroiled in a civil war on a planet called Sanction IV.  He’s been hired by a group of mercenaries to act as an officer as they fight against a ‘neoQuellist’ (more on this later) revolutionary who’s attempting to wrest control from the Protectorate sanctioned corporate government. While the UN has taken an official ‘hands-off’ stance on the war on Sanction IV, Morgan makes it clear in the opening that the mercenaries hired by the corporations are being at least partially backed by the UN.

At the outset Takeshi’s fancy combat sleeve has been damaged and he’s recuperating in an orbital hospital with his team where he meets a man who seems to have snuck into the facility with the sole purpose of finding our hero. He lays out a rather extraordinary story and Morgan does a little more world building.

Back in Altered Carbon a brief mention is made to the fact that when humans finally got to Mars they found that someone had been there before them. Under the surface they found vast cities that apparently belonged to a space fairing race some 500,000 years previous. While they aren’t from Mars originally they are referred to as Martians by everyone for lack of a better term. We learn in Broken Angels that the human race found it’s colony planets by following charts left by these ancient Martians and on each world we’ve found more and more Martian cities and technology, and that these Martians were about 7 feet tall and evolved from predatory birds; they have wings and could fly.

The man who has come to get Takeshi is one Jan Schneider, a pilot who worked with an archeological expedition and uncovered something exceptional, a Martian gateway that seems to lead to deep space where a massive Martian warship is parked. Seeing this for the find of a lifetime Takeshi agrees to work with Schneider in his plot to recover this ship. They go on to rescue the original archeological team leader from a detention camp, and recruit funding and help from a local corporation.

Broken Angels departs from the first book in that there’s no real mystery here. This isn’t a detective novel, it’s mostly military sci-fi. There’s a lot of guns, a lot of action, and the same jarring sex scenes as the first. This doesn’t make for a bad novel by any means, the way Morgan slowly peels back the layers of Martian mythology is quite good. Morgan paints a very interesting picture of a race wholly alien to us, living in a manner that we can’t even imagine. His descriptions of Martian architecture on their ship really comes alive as our main characters struggle to navigate a vessel designed for a species that can fly. In the end, while I feel that this is the weakest book in the trio, we get a more satisfying conclusion than Altered Carbon with Takeshi riding off into the sunset as it were.

Remember when I mentioned ‘neoQuellism’ back there? This really comes to bear in the third, and supposedly final novel, Woken Furies. Once again we open with Takeshi Kovacs waking up in a new body, only problem is it’s not the Kovacs we know, it’s a much earlier copy of himself from his time when he was still an Envoy. Brash and young, he’s yet to have been soiled and disenchanted by his experiences on other Protectorate worlds with the Envoy Corps. He’s been brought back to his home world, Harlan’s World, to hunt someone. Who? Well his much older self, of course.

After the events of Broken Angels our hero (the old one, not the new one, we lose track of him for 15 chapters or so) has come home to Harlan’s World to look up an old friend, Sarah, whom we met breifly as she was gunned down in the opening paragraphs of Altered Carbon. He finds her, but it’s not a happy reunion and events that follow set Takeshi on a mission of retribution against a hard-line new religion, The New Revelation, that is taking root on his world. The New Revelation are a rather thinly veiled carbon copy of modern day extremist Muslims and it took me out of the book a little bit but they make a decent background plot device.

When a dealing with one of his local contacts goes bad and he falls foul of the local yakuza Takeshi finds himself with a group of corporate mercenaries called ‘deCons’ tasked with cleaning up the mess left 300 years ago on the island of New Hokkaido. In the previous novels Kovacs has often been accused of being a follower of Quell and with Woken Furies we finally find out exactly who this Quell is.

Quellcrist Falconer is a long dead revolutionary leader from Harlan’s World whose band of rebels twice try and overthrow the ‘First Families’ who rule with a Protectorate backed oligarchy. The second uprising, called the ‘Unsettlement’ was an all out war that left New Hokkaido covered in autonomous machines left over after the Quellists were vanquished and Quell herself shot out of the sky by the orbiting Martian weapons platforms that don’t allow anything on Harlan’s World to fly any higher then 400 meters. While working with this deCon crew Takeshi finds that their leader, a woman with massive technological modifications to her head in the form of Protectorate licensed ‘command software interfaces’  — used to communicate with her team, and to take down the machines roaming New Hokkaido — seems to have picked up the stored personality of Quellcrist herself (real name Nadia Makita).

Kovacs quickly becomes embroiled with a power struggle between the Quellists, the local government, his illiegal copy, old friends, and the Envoys as he seeks to protect this woman. In the end some fairly ‘big things’ are revealed about the Martians and how human scientists are trying to communicate with what they left behind.

Woken Furies is a somewhat slower paced novel then the previous two. Morgan focuses more on the interplay between the neoQuellists and their enemies and with Takeshi’s own inner turmoil. Not to say there isn’t any action in this, there certainly is. The early fights with the machines of New Hokkaido are exciting and and the final battle is a well painted one that leaves you on the edge of your seat right up to the final pages. The final revelations of the novel only leave you wanting more, so I’m a little sad to hear that Morgan has hinted that this will probably be the last of the Takeshi Kovacs novels.  There’s a lot more that can be done with this universe so I hope that Morgan does return to it some day.

So, after all this, what’s good about these books? First and foremost, as I’ve mentioned, the world that Morgan creates is rich and full of great cyberpunk/distopian future flavor. A universe run by a massive overlord government and on a more local scale by corrupt corporations and families sets a background for a group of well drawn and ultimately compelling characters to act on. Above all else, and probably most importantly, it leaves you wanting more.

So, what’s bad about these books? Not too much. At times the backstory for Kovacs becomes a little heavy handed and I was left skipping paragraphs because by the third book I’d heard it all a dozen times before. Also, while the first sex scene was a little jarring when it heated up it was fairly well written and gave an erotic edge to the story so it worked well, however by the final sex scene in the third book I was getting tired of Morgans gratuitous depictions of filthy sex. It seemed tacked on a little and sex just for the sake of sex. Maybe if you spaced the reading of these books out a little it wouldn’t be as bad.

Overall these are three great books, you should read them.

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Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel (Takeshi Kovacs Novels)
Broken Angels
Woken Furies: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel