Category: SPSFC5 (Page 1 of 2)

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.

This is my first new 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 Black Sails to Sunward by Sheila Jenné. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

Lucy, an officer of the Imperial Navy, and Moira, her former best friend, find themselves on opposite sides of a war that threatens their home. Yet the crackling attraction between them hasn’t faded, and it’s time for Lucy to make a choice between loyalty and her own conscience.

My Review

I really enjoyed my time with this book. From the scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists, it was my favorite of the ones I sampled, and it held up as I read the full book as an official quarterfinalist pick. It’s a book that combines a lot of different kinds of stories. It was a solar-system-based sci fi story of a war between Mars and Earth, but rather than a hard-sci-fi approach as in The Expanse, this threw in elements of British naval stories like Master and Commander along with regency romance. You might be wondering how that’s possible, but Jenné takes a semi-bonkers premise, mixes it with just the right amount of arm-waving, and comes out with a fun tale full of (astro)nautical adventure, romance, class conflict, canvaspunk, and politics. If you’re willing to go for that kind of head-spinning ride, the book absolutely delivers.

Plot and Characters

NOTE: MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW.

The book almost exclusively focuses on Lucy Prescott, a daughter of a Martian noble family who was destined for high society, but whose family has fallen on hard times, forcing her to enlist in the Martian Emprex’s fleet as the lowest rank of the officer class, a midshipman, complete with breeches, coats with brass buttons, and a tricorn hat. Lucy’s first voyage on the ship is a delight, showing how the ship operates, how the officers and crew deal with each other, and how she navigates some difficulties with crew and with Moira, a former servant of hers whom she discovers serving on the ship. There is a single chapter later on that somewhat jarringly jumps to Moira’s perspective, but otherwise, it’s the Lucy show.

The world Lucy lives in is a little far-fetched, and how much you enjoy the book will likely rest on how willing you are to accept this future. A background primer as I understood it:

• Mars was settled by Earth scientists hoping to terraform it into a habitable planet
• Earth corporations were more interested in stripping Mars of resources, setting up a conflict between Earth and its colony.
• At some point in the recent past, there was a technological meltdown involving computers and AI, which massively disrupted both Earth and Mars.
• In the aftermath, both Earth and Mars have sworn off computers entirely, leading them into a technological state full of contrasts. For example, they have hydroponics and space travel, but the ships are made mostly of heavily altered wood and have huge cloth sails to catch the solar wind. They navigate space like sailors of old, with sextants and mental math. They fight mostly with torpedos, but they switch to swords and knives when they board each others’ ships.
• Mars has adopted a kind of a neofeudal system, with nobles descended from the original Martian scientist settlers presiding over a much larger peasant class. This looks and feels a lot like a kind of Martian Bridgerton.
• Earth’s demands of Mars grew too onerous and exploitative, jeopardizing the terraforming projects, so Mars and Earth are now at war, with warring fleets of sailing ships traversing the space between them, conducting raids, captures against the enemy.

The plot centers around Lucy’s work as a new officer on a Martian warship, at first learning her role, then acting in it, which forces her to make tough choices and reevaluate the society and culture in which she’s lived a privileged life. As her journey continues, she faces Earth forces, pirates, hazards, deception, and romance. She changes and grows throughout her challenges as she decides what kind of officer and what kind of person she wants to be, and most importantly, where her loyalties lie.

My Thoughts

Like Bisection, Jenné’s finalist in last year’s SPSFC, this book is well-written and engaging throughout. That book had a big what-if central issue centered on the main character’s biology, while this one is much more of a traditional rollicking adventure, albeit in a tremendously weird (and delightful) imagined future.

For me as a reader, I loved the huge swing Jenné took here with the story. All sci-fi is speculative, imagining stories and futures that don’t exist, but this book is especially (and tremendously) ambitious, creating a society and technology reminiscent of 18th-century Britain, but setting it in space, and throwing in a rousing and harrowing naval adventure tale as the meat of it. To Jenné’s credit, she has solid and consistent reasons for why society is how it is and why technology is how it is, although believing this would all be possible might be a challenge for some readers. Jenné is also wise enough to give you lots of hints and snippets about how things work without trying to explain all the details. That gives you a sense of verisimilitude, at least a verisimilitude that the characters fully accept. Whenever you start to think too hard about how the tech or the military actions or the culture would actually work, you start to lose what is magical about the story, so I tried not to do that as much as I could. There’s a lot of technical detail shared about life on the ships, and there’s a bunch of physics, engineering, and zero-gee adaptation that are described ably, so it’s not all arm-waving – not in the least.

If you are willing to accept the setting and the tech, which is admittedly a big ask, then you get a really great, really imaginative story. Lucy’s journey through her challenges, and her interactions with people both savory and unsavory, are a delight to follow. I don’t want to spoil it, because it’s fun, but there are naval battles, crew struggles, betrayal, cutlass fights, stealth missions, subterfuge, and more. I really loved the Master and Commander parts of life as a minor officer on a ship of war – those parts really sang. Some of the story wrestles quite effectively with old-school naval officer issues like honor, duty, and the limits of what a society and a commander can expect of you, and what you can accept in the name of following orders.

Where the book showed a little weakness for me was in two areas. One was coincidence – Lucy frequently meets people (or re-meets people) that it seemed to me highly unlikely she would run into, unless there are only a few hundred people in space, which is not the impression I think I was supposed to get. There are also some deus ex machina moments in some of her adventures and misadventures where just the right thing happens at just the right time, whether it’s a discovery or a breakthrough or a foe’s mistake or a purloined tool. The other weakness I perceived was in Lucy’s internal journey. As a whole, it was interesting and effectively portrayed, with lots of real growth, but there were times where she seemed to retreat into a foolish, naive, and indecisive state which was in stark contrast to the plucky, whip-smart person we’d seen in the rest of it. Especially as she’s deciding on her priorities and actions at the end, I felt she wallowed in indecision and then made choices that seemed somewhat inconsistent with the thoughts we’d seen just pages before. This wasn’t a big problem, but it took me out of the story a bit, especially when her naive/foolish bits got turned up higher (e.g. when she was evaluating her relationship with annoyingly little perception or insight, or when she didn’t recognize her own initials). The love story that develops was interesting and fun to follow, but again, I’m not sure it felt completely real to me, although Lucy’s thoughts and desires and concerns were well portrayed, and it added a strong motivation and difficult choice for Lucy to make.

All of that is just minor nitpicks and can be easily ignored. The story was just fun for me throughout. The resolution was one I did not see coming, and it found a way to be far more satisfying than the terrible options it seemed might come to pass. I really enjoyed reading Lucy’s adventures, and I’m a sucker for naval derring-do, which this book has in spades. Jenné’s willingness to throw in some science and physics and engineering without overdoing it and spoiling the magic of her premise was a terrific balance to strike. Great fun, and ably constructed despite the tall challenge. Jenné embraces the bonkers and just flies with it in the best way.

Summation

If you’re willing to come at Black Sails to Sunward with an open mind and accept some of its fundamental audacity at face value, you’ll be in for a real treat. A heartfelt and thrilling tale of struggle, hope, love, and despair, all set in a canvaspunk (yes, I’m trying to make that a thing) future full of tall sails, fierce pirates, and broadsides in the black ocean between planets.