This is my first review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the semifinal round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is ab initio by Jacob Terracina. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Raza Mugabi, a biologist turned software engineer, is not sure why this particular tech startup hired him. His track record is far from stellar. In fact, he’s not certain what the company ultimately even does. Sometimes it’s better to keep your head down and your mouth shut, he figures. At least, until his curiosity gets the better of him.

Eight years later, Raza finds himself as a defendant and key technical witness in a high-profile court case. A world-class prosecutor and a woefully inexperienced defense attorney go head-to-head against each other, their clients, and their consciences in an effort to answer the question on everyone’s mind:
Is the startup’s invention, legally speaking, human?

The arguments leap between the technical, political, ethical, and philosophical consequences of the decision, and as the trial progresses, the many, many secrets of the startup are laid bare in this hilarious cross-genre thrill-ride.

My Review

This is a great, great book, all the more impressive as a debut novel. At its heart is a common trope in sci fi, the personhood of artificial beings, but the book soars far, far beyond that foundation, with courtroom drama, an interesting back-and-forth narrative structure, imaginative tech, a future semi-dystopian society, and the best part by far, a bunch of richly imagined and delightful characters.

Plot and Characters

The book centers around a company, jinwha (lower-case j sic) that has found a unique way to develop an artificial human brain, through a recapitulation of the evolution of humans on Earth. I’m talking a full recapitulation, too, from the earliest single-celled organisms to modern humans. The plot has two threads that it swaps between as the story unfolds. One thread is a present-day courtroom showdown between a prosecutor backed by a shadowy luddite non-profit who is pushing to categorize this new kind of parahuman as artificial, not deserving of any rights or protections. On the other side is a legendary Icelandic defense attorney and his adopted daughter and partner, working to defend jinwha and its creation, and to establish a precedent that this particular kind of artificial human is deserving of the rights and protections of law and of personhood.

The second thread is a series of progressive flashbacks, showing Raza, a biologist turned coder, from his very first days at jinwha through his deeper engagement with the project as it proceeds. Raza’s jangling, perceptive, funny, neurospicy voice is a delight – at times, he is a genius, at other times, a fool, and his passion for the work despite barely hanging on most of the time gives the book a richness and a tension I’ve seldom seen anywhere.

We see the story through three main characters. Each is different, deep, and well-drawn, with a unique voice and perspective, and each is a delight. I’ve already mentioned Raza, from whose perspective we see nearly all of the flashback plot, although there are occasional forays into other very cool characters’ heads. The other two are Javinta Puri, the prosecuting attorney, who is ice cold and professional but also aware that there’s more going on in the case than there seems at first glance, and Sovhi Egilsdottir, who is there to assist her brilliant foster parent but who ends up taking on far more of the defense than intended.

My Thoughts

What a ride. In a book that alternates plotlines, you run the risk of one plot being less interesting than the other, or of cutting away when a reader might rather read more. I never felt that way here – I was always excited to see how the other plot was doing, and I enjoyed the characters so much it was always a joy to return to them and see what they were up to in the other storyline. Raza, especially, has this comic, tortured, idiosyncratic, unsure journey through the world, and seeing him bumble, then react, then self-critique, all with wisdom and humor, is a treat. His coworkers, including a friendship-turned-love interest that’s handled with so much care, subtlety and realism, and a hard-driving boss, and an only partially sane tech guy, are absolutely terrific. The sci fi here is interesting and thought-provoking, but it’s really the characters that make the story, and you care about all of them.

Insufferable Pedantry Warning – proceed with caution

As a guy with a Ph.D. in geology who’s taught paleontology a lot of times, I will admit to being a little confused/bemused by the impossibly unlikely premise of trying to recapitulate all of evolution in a model in order to reproduce each exact step and branch on the way to perfectly simulated humans. This is a conceit, for sure, and Terracina wisely doesn’t go too deep in trying to make it make absolute technical sense, instead leaving it to some fun discussions, a little bit of computational arm-waving, and some fundamental principles which, despite not making a ton of sense, provide a reasonable framework for where the book wants to go. Real evolution is full of randomness, of course. One of Stephen Jay Gould’s favorite words, serendipity, governs a lot of evolution, so any model trying to reproduce it would be full of luck and random chance, not something that a computer could easily model, and not something that would lead to the same result that we happened to arrive at in the real world. jinwha’s model is very highly deterministic, with an exact copy of human intelligence as the goal, which is not at all how biological evolution actually worked, and which falls prey to the common fallacy that humans are somehow special and somehow the end-state of all evolutionary processes, neither of which is true, at all. Still, if I can let that go, surely most everybody else will be able to, and it didn’t really hinder my very great enjoyment of the story.

Despite my nitpicking, the mechanism of the evolution scheme and the technology weren’t that important. Buy into them, and you’ve got a great story to follow. I had a little bit of an issue with the court proceeding also, which seemed to have no real rules of evidence and some questionable strategies on both sides, strategies that seemed more geared to increasing narrative tension than to winning the case, but the story is so damn good you just let that stuff go. The high-stakes ending is perfect, and I found my breath literally catching in my throat as the final courtroom scenes played out. Just wonderful writing, and a perfect payoff for everything you’ve invested in the story.

Summation

This is a great book. I still have quite a few semifinalists and finalists to read, and I know the books get better the farther you go in one of these competitions, but this is the book to beat for me so far. I really loved my time with it, and I would gladly follow wherever Terracina goes next. Wherever that is, it’s sure to be populated by amazing characters that you won’t want to let go of when you’re done.

This is my fourth review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Final Season by Andrew Gillsmith. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

For fans of Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and PG Wodehouse.

It’s one thing to know that the End is coming, quite another to know the exact date and time right down to the nanosecond.

Such is the unhappy fate of the inhabitants of Rexos-4, a once-thriving planet that has lived under the doom of an inevitable apocalypse for millenia. Their entire philosophy of life may be summed up by the phrase “Mxtlpicam’ bnak ooligapn,” which in most languages translates to something along the lines of “What’s the bloody point?”

Unbeknownst to the poor Rexans, their predicament has also been the subject of the longest-running and most successful reality television series in galactic history, now translated into over 200 million languages, with closed captioning. With the end of the world just around the corner, the show is entering its all-important final season. Everyone knows how difficult it is to pull off a satisfying finale–such stakes fill even the most hard-boiled Gallywood executives with fear and trembling.

Join Gumpilos Tfliximop, Elvie Renfro, Rufus Camford and a cast of colorful characters as they battle the notorious showrunner (and subverter of expectations) Betty Neezquaff, all while tackling the big questions of life’s meaning and purpose with wit, warmth, and–dare I say–optimism.

The Final Season is The Truman Show meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with just a dash of PG Wodehouse.

My Review

This is a really funny romp done in a style very reminiscent of Douglas Adams. Gillsmith’s clever prose, told from the POV of an in-world narrator observer, shines, even when he goes off on silly (and sometimes deeply thoughtful) tangents. The world and the alien people in it are (despite complicated multisyllabic names and varied body morphologies) deeply human, and Gillsmith uses them and their situation to do a Jonathan Swift-style takedown of humanity, media, and ambition.

Plot and Characters

The book starts with a totally-out-there killer concept – a world that has been the subject (unbeknownst to them) of a long-running reality TV program, and which is now only weeks from destruction. This is introduced by the narrator, who self-describes as a mid-level writer for Gallywood, the entertainment industry that has run the show (and many others, including a not-too-disguised Star Wars homage). In reality, I suspect the narrator sounds an awful lot like Gillsmith does, but that’s fine – he’s clever, eloquent, and full of cynicism and wry observations.

The main plot follows a lovable couple on the doomed planet, and it starts as they meet and fall in love, a desperately romantic thing to do as their world is ending. We follow them throughout the last days of Rexos-4, but we also follow four Gallywood characters – producers and interns and managers – as they scheme about how to handle the end of their long-running program (and of Rexos-4). Some of them have noble goals, trying to save some of the victims, while others are so cynical that they are rooting for a tragic ending to the show in order to please critics or their own aesthetic taste. This conflict plays out in a slim novel frequently interrupted by observations, explanations, ruminations, and general silliness.

My Thoughts

Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide books the plot here is secondary to the jokes and commentary. Unless you are Douglas Adams, that is a risky thing to try, but Gillsmith’s fun style and the absurdity of the views and situations and people he’s describing more than make up for a plot that sometimes lurches around and never seems to matter that much, at least until some poignant moments towards the end, which also work and, though somewhat out of keeping with the breeziness of the rest of it, were effective and unexpected.

One other difference here from Douglas Adams is the scale and sheer goofiness of the universe described (where the scale is smaller and the universe, though silly, slightly less goofy). There are the same silly societies and weird technology and amusing references, but the focus is much tighter, on just a few people and just a couple of alien races (although they’re so human as to not seem very alien). I think there’s also a little more of a search for truth or meaning here, and maybe a little more social critique, than I remember from the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, although I read them long ago.

The book largely worked really well for me, and I really enjoyed it. If I were going to offer some criticism, it is that the plot mostly didn’t really matter (despite being about the deaths of billions), and the people making the big choices didn’t seem to have complex motives, or at least, they weren’t complex other than to set up a joke or an extended amusing ramble. I guess I mean that while they were very funny, they were either Tess Trueheart or Waluigi, complete with mustache twirling (or virtual twirling) without much complexity or agency beyond that, and in many cases their elaborate strategies didn’t work and were just swept away by the next silly thing.

That breezy, comic tone and back-and-forth plot made what I felt like the emotional climax of the book feel slightly off-kilter or off-tone for me, in that it dove deeper and assumed a seriousness and complexity lacking in the rest of the story, although it did embrace a lot of emotions not previously explored. In the copy I had, there were also a good many formatting or punctuation errors, including a lot of extra mid-sentence line breaks and some paragraphs where two people spoke in succession, a dialog no-no. Those didn’t hinder anything, but in case Andrew ever reads this, it might be worth making sure they’re cleared up in the official published work.

Summation

This is a really good book, and Gillsmith is a clever, funny writer. Comedy in sci-fi is actually a little hard to pull off, especially if you’re putting yourself next to one of the masters of the genre, as his book description does. But he pulls it off well, and this is a quick, fun read that will make you laugh a lot and think more than you expect.

This is my third review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Gamer by Belinda Crawford. The book is available from the author’s site.

Blurb

Vlad – gamer, hacker, scourge… Angel of Death.

Vlad’s parents died in a car accident; she can still feel the flames licking her skin, smell the burning batteries and fire-retardant. Except it wasn’t an accident, someone made it happen.

She’s has spent the last nine years tracking those responsible; planning, plotting.

She’s almost done.

When the last move is over, her opponent will wish they never played with the Angel of Death.

Get ready to jack in and play along as Crawford masterfully weaves a complex, action-packed tale of virtual reality and revenge.

My Review

Of all the books I read during our scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists, this one definitely had the clearest and most intense sense of style. It dripped with cyberpunk goodness, reminding me of my time with William Gibson’s books, of my many Shadowrun adventures back in the 1990s, and of my heartily enjoyed playthrough of the Cyberpunk PS5 game. Coupled with a strong vengeance motive (as is clear from the blurb above) and a bunch of richly realized game-based scenes, some with a cool LitRPG flavor, and a full cast of characters who would be at home in NeoTokyo or Neuromancer, and you’ve got a rich story based on a solid foundation that I know took a ton of work to put together.

Plot and Characters

The book mostly stays with the main character, Vladana Tong, although there are occasional chapters from other points of view. She’s a handful – a badass hacker, a netrunner, a Scourge (the book’s lingo for someone who plays in the main VR game but hacks the system for advantages), and also on a personal quest to avenge her parents’ murder.

The plot basically follows that whodunit mystery to its conclusion, although there are tons of side adventures full of midnight motorcycle rides, secret hacker lairs, esports and politics, shady megacorps, and skeezeball lowlifes. Vlad has a past life she gave up to steep herself in the hacker world, and some folks reappear from that time with complicated relationships to who she is now. Her parents have left her a confusing and unclear legacy that she needs to unravel to understand why they died. She also falls in with an esports team full of colorful larger-than-life folks. They need each other but don’t trust each other, and there’s a lot of interesting jockeying there as the titular gamer part of the book occurs over a series of virtual-world trainings and combats. There are also shadowy criminal elements, sometimes pursued by Vlad and sometimes pursuing her. If you get the idea that there is a ton happening in this book, you’re one hundred percent right.

My Thoughts

For me, the book’s biggest strength is its vibe, although “vibe” doesn’t really do justice to the complexity and worldbuilding going on here. There’s a huge lingo and futuristic cultural context to everything, from vehicles to tech to clothes to food to game tools to corporate shenanigans, and it runs rich and deep throughout the whole thing. There’s hardly a paragraph that doesn’t have some cool jargon or slang or tech to reveal. There’s a very cool running issue of how the game world works, and the sacrifices that some players make to get an edge, including fascinating descriptions of when characters suffer “lag” when the game world they were so immersed in carries over as hallucinations in “the Real.” The descriptions of the characters and tactics in-game were really fun for me, and the real-world grit and tension is just as interesting.

The vibe is more than enough to carry the book, and it largely does, which I think was probably Ms. Crawford’s goal. I loved all of that stuff, a lot. Where the book was weaker for me was in a few areas. One was a plot that jumped around a ton, focusing on different people and places, sometimes hiding information from the reader that would have been helpful to know. Vengeance plots are a little limiting in general, but the choices here made the story a little hard to follow for me. Vlad’s detective work sometimes made sense and led logically from one discovery to another, but at other times, she found a ton of bewildering stuff that wasn’t always clear to me (or her, I think), until she just pulled on a thread and got somewhere else. I think I would have appreciated more planning and more focus on the detective parts, and more thought than impulse on Vlad’s part in tracking stuff down. Sometimes she made what seemed to be rash and uninformed decisions, and sometimes those turned out to be exactly what she needed, while others were just as stupid as they seemed, but we sometimes didn’t find that out for a long time. She also seemed to be variable in her hacker competence – sometimes effortlessly deadly, and sometimes seeming to make basic mistakes. That made her a bit of a frustrating character to follow – at times, and especially towards the book’s conclusion, she was almost a spectator to her own mystery rather than the active, super-competent hacker sleuth she is in other parts. I may not be smart enough to have understood everything, but I had trouble figuring out the full plot of the mystery and all of the factions involved, although the big bad’s role is spelled out pretty well at the end, and the book has a conclusion that wraps most things up.

Another thing I had some trouble with was the intensity of all the characters, particularly with their emotional state. Vlad seemed to be in a constant state of near-explosion rage, and the side characters were often right there with her. That’s good for a few tense scenes, but it was way too much for me. She made a ton of errors by being impetuous and ragey, too, which added to my frustration. I know that was part of her origin story and her character, but I found that I sometimes wanted her to, like, make a sandwich, draw a bath, and watch some cartoons rather than tearing somebody’s head off in a screamfight, rage riding her bike, or punching herself to exhaustion in the gym. There weren’t a lot of fundamentally likeable characters in the thing, although some of the esports team got there. Even they would have hissy fits from time to time, though, and I just wanted to turn the emotional volume down a little. From an editing perspective, also, there were a LOT of comma splices, at least one every couple pages, and my radar pings at things like that.

Most of those complaints are nitpicks – personal-taste things, not harsh critiques. I did enjoy the book, and I really enjoyed following Vlad’s adventures. I might have made different (and no more valid) choices with regard to plotting, focus, and characterization, but I’m absolutely in awe of the depth and consistency of the worldbuilding, use of language, and vibe. All of this flavor seeped into every scene and sentence, popping naturally and sharply off the page. That’s great work, inspiring both awe and envy in this author, who has never even attempted anything this ambitious.

Summation

This is a solid book that well-deserved its quarterfinalist status on the full read. If you’re a fan of cyberpunk and gamerlit, you’ll find a ton to enjoy here, as I did. A richly-imagined near-future society and gamer/hacker culture spring to life here on every page.

This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Triangle Age by David Aumelas. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Earth is adrift. Its mass is spent, the moon ditched, and the sun is not even a memory. Five thousand humans live in its last city, Thule. None know where they started or where they are going, least of all Lowell.

Lowell scrubs the pipes beneath Thule. He knows where to push silt and how to break down a beluga carcass. For everything else he listens to Renth. Renth is a foot taller than anyone else in Thule and yet has never fallen in the reservoir, never been locked in a smoker. She knows the pipes matter. She listens to Lowell, and Lowell talks to no one else. He doesn’t need Thule, only Renth, height and all, until she pushes him down the deepest hole in the pipes.

To return to Thule, he will brave incineration, muskoxen, the vacuum of space and a giant fan. He seeks Renth, her embrace or her death, and to deliver a message he does not understand.

My Review

I was intrigued by this book from the scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists. It was clear it was well-written in a spare, interesting style, with a lot of mystery and brutality. Finishing the full book as a quarterfinalist, I found the strengths that were present in the opening parts continued throughout, although the story got a lot more convoluted and weird as it progressed. Taking another look at the blurb, I can see that some of the spoilers I was worried about avoiding are in there, although there’s a lot of detail left to discover.

Plot and Characters

The book stays entirely with a low-level pipe worker, Lowell. We meet him in the pipes below his city, where he explores, cleans, and maintains that system. We get the idea that his world is small, a single city with only a limited surrounding environment. Nearly everyone in the city works in one of several castes, helping the city survive. There’s also some intrigue, as it appears Lowell has been sent down into the pipes with an unsuspecting companion whom he’s been assigned to murder, and this isn’t the first time he’s had that kind of assignment. That’s the setup, and what happens as the book progresses starts there and cascades into a series of adventures (and misadventures) as Lowell figures out more of what’s going on in his little world. We stay solidly in his close 1st-person POV for the whole book.

It wasn’t immediately apparent to me, since I jumped into the book without reading the blurb, but the story is that Earth has mostly died, and the people in its remaining city, Thule, are clinging to life helped by (often failing) technologies that they don’t understand. Some of this world is deliberately confusing as it is revealed (e.g. the Sun isn’t where it should be, and the ecosystems seem pretty weird). Much of that confusion comes from the fact that all of this is interpreted by Lowell, whose interpretations are based on his understanding of his primitive society in Thule and through his religion, which he only partly understands, that borrows heavily from the Inuit tradition. The book is full of Inuit mythology adapted to the futuristic (yet primitive) setting. Lowell ends up discovering more about how the world and his society work, and exploring a lot more of it, but his interpretations are always colored by his primitive upbringing, his religion, and his limited understanding of the world.

My Thoughts

For me, the book’s strengths are several. It is absolutely not afraid to be weird, and to obscure what is going on behind its thick layers of mood and imaginative future history mixed with a society that is both highly technological and also stone age. Lowell and the many, many interesting people he meets do not line up in standard archetypes of villains and heroes. Everybody is both good and bad, and only a very few even know enough about their world to make anything other than individual moral decisions. And the morality they live under is something very different from modern Western traditions – life is a lot cheaper, and conflict and fear and exploitation are common. I was often surprised and intrigued by decisions Lowell and others made in the book, because they often weren’t what I would do. It is a credit to Aumelas that he accomplished that while making the characters individually and collectively consistent (mostly). The cultural vibe is also strong with this one. I’m not sure to what extent Aumelas is borrowing Inuit mythology and religion – I’m not an expert in that at all, and I don’t know if he has a personal connection to it – but that strong flavor permeates the whole thing, and if you’re willing to go with what can sometimes feels a little like cultural appropriation, it adds a richness and a flavor and an intriguing difference from traditional sci fi.

Where the book was weaker for me was in the story, which I found somewhat frustrating. That frustration comes from a big choice, one that deserves some credit, but it also made the book at times feel random and unsatisfying. That choice is to make Lowell ignorant of most of what he runs into in his many journeys, which makes him often misinterpret people and places and make impetuous, foolish decisions. That turns his journey often into more of a misadventure than an adventure, and it can make him a frustrating person to follow. In a way, I suppose he is like a character from a myth, wandering the Earth buffeted by the whims of the gods, which is a style of storytelling that has entertained people for thousands of years, but because we as sci-fi readers know a little of the truth of what he finds, his flailing and errors for me became tiresome, even if they were consistent with his character and experience. The most frustrating moments of this kind of thing were when he met people or entities who could absolutely have told him what he needed to know, but either they were vague about it, or he did some rash, foolish thing that kept him from learning. This is one of those books where if people had just had a few more conversations, the whole thing would have gone a lot more smoothly, and there was often no real reason not to have those conversations.

There’s also a lot of coincidence, with some significant deus ex machina moments. If you view the book as a myth – as Lowell probably experienced it – with a primitive person on a journey arc coming into contact with unexplained forces and powers, then the machinations are to be expected, but it does remove a lot of agency from Lowell and his companions, which made me sometimes wonder why we were experiencing the story from his viewpoint.

There’s some interesting musing on morality and tough choices, even though Lowell usually lacks the information to make informed decisions, but it’s interesting to see how he adapts his (very weird) situation to his religious upbringing and tries to find his way, often blundering, sometimes seeming completely amoral or evil, sometimes trying to help and protect. Several of the other characters and entities live with him in this highly conflicted space. Where it works, it’s interesting and tense, but where it doesn’t, it seems deliberately lurid or shocking and exploitative.

Summation

I can almost guarantee you haven’t read another book like this. It’s creative, it’s gloriously weird, it manages to hold both the primitive and the futurist in one space with neither ceding control, and it is almost always unexpected. I’m glad I had a chance to read it for the competition.