Life of Andrew

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
ISBN: 978-0-441-01867-3

Bob Howard is having a bad week. Being an agent for the supernatural “Laundry” branch of the British secret services is tough enough at the best of times, but he has already messed up one mission and things back at the office are getting hairy. Both an important document and Bob’s mysterious boss go missing at the same time, and the list of people who want Bob dead is growing longer by the hour.

The Fuller Memorandum is the third in the Laundry series, but this is my introduction to the books. It is based on the amusing-but-not-quite-original conceit that all the things that Lovecraft and his ilk wrote about actually exist and the British government has a agency dedicated to defending humanity against them and their cultish minions.

According to Wikipedia, each book in the series is written as a pastiche of a different classic spy novelist. This is potentially clever idea, but I found the style really grating in some parts of The Fuller Memorandum. Much of the plot revolves around the interactions between Bob and his equally talented agent wife, but the scenes of domestic comedy did not gel well with unspeakable horror that drips off adjacent pages. The tone was just too uneven for me to really get into the story.

Having said that, The Fuller Memorandum was an imaginative and fast moving read with some neat ideas. There is enjoyment to be had if you can get passed the tone, and perhaps it makes better reading if you have been following the series. Maybe I was just disappointed that The Fuller Memorandum was not more similar to A Colder War, a neat novelette from the same author based on a similar premise but apparently not part of the same series.

Not really recommended unless you like this sort of thing. A Colder War however is recommended so you should click that link right now.

Cryptic : The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

A mammoth collection of scifi short stories by the prolific Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has an old-fashioned manner and his stories remind me strongly of the tales from the 50s and 60s that I grew up reading – this is not a bad thing.

Not every story is a corker, but most are good and some are downright excellent. My one complaint is that they tend to be rather constant in tone and style, I finished the book yesterday and the stories are all starting to blend together in my head.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing

Oceanic By Greg Egan

Another collection of Scifi short stories, this time by Greg Egan. Egan is a programmer, and his stories are hard-as-diamond tales of artificial life, strange physical frontiers behind every atom, and clear-eyed researchers heroically hunched over keyboards in darkened rooms. Great stuff, and this collection really shows his ferocious imagination and range as a writer. The title story (full text here) in particular is a very well done piece that packs a lot of depth into a few pages.

Highly recommended

A book by Iain M. Banks set in his nigh-utopian “culture” society that features a strangely named misfit with a unique skill who gets manipulated into performing a mission of great danger and importance. Who could have guessed?

In this case, the weirdo is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, who is very,very good at games. So good that he the perfect choice to travel outside of the Culture to the Empire of Azad to play the greatest game he has encountered. The game is simply called Azad, and is based on (or forms the basis for) the tenets of the Empire’s society. Those that play the game well gain power, prestige, and government posts, even the emperor is selected this way. Those that play and lose fare badly. Azad (the game) is fantastically complex, so much so that actions that take place on the room-sized boards are supposed to represent the core philosophies of the players, making it a fantastically useful HR tool. Anyone who wants to get anywhere in Azad society devotes their lives to the study and practice of the game.

Although Jernau is only supposed to be the token Culture participant, he finds that his alien playing style confounds the natives and he does better than anyone predicted, although at a cost to his somewhat fragile psyche. Eventually, as he learns more about the game and Azad society in general (linked as they are), Jernau comes to believe he could go all the way to the final and play for the empire itself.

The Player of Games is one of Bank’s more approachable books, not having any of the stylistic or structural gimmicks of some of the other Culture novels. The story is pretty straight forward (there is a twist, but it is fairly transparent) but told in the usual imaginative style. The Azad are vividly described, seeing them through the eyes of somebody both living amongst them and playing against them is an interesting literary device. The book’s main point that games are a window into the soul of a society is well realized, if maybe a little heavy handed. But you know what you are getting yourself into when you pick up an Iain M Bank’s book, I suspect he types with concrete gloves.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing.
        

Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

After years of hearing “Hyperion is the bestest book evar!”, I finally managed to read it. And frankly, it is pretty good.

Set in the far future where humanity has created The Hegemony of Man, a culture that spans many planets thanks to portals (“farcasters”) that have openings many light-years apart. But there are some (the “Ousters”) who live in fleets of deep space vessels around the edges of the Hegemony. As the story opens, the Ousters have launched an attack on the planet Hyperion, not part of the Hegemony proper but under its control and a vital part of many hidden plans. Against this backdrop 7 pilgrims are thrown together on a religious quest to the Time Tombs, mysterious structures on a remote part of Hyperion haunted by an even more mysterious (and murderous) creature – the Shrike.

Trying to summarize all of Hyperion’s tortured plot-lines would be fruitless – there is a lot going on. But the frame story mainly concerns the difficult pilgrimage across the planet. The pilgrims initially do not know each other and the bulk of the book is made up of each pilgrim telling their own story to the others in their own words as they travel. It turns out that far from being totally random each pilgrim has a reason for wanting to go to the Time Tombs and some even wish to meet the Shrike. But are they all telling the truth?

Hyperion is basically review-bait – filled with pretentious literary allusions, most of which probably went over my head. Its structure borrows from Chaucer, but it is also clearly influenced in a big way by the poetry of Keats, but to say more would be to spoil things. If nothing else it forced me to spend an hour or two on Wikipedia trying to educate myself. The stories are all told in different styles, and information is cleverly conveyed so that by the end of the book the reader thinks they have a good understanding on the way in which the universe works.

That said, Hyperion has one massive flaw. By the last chapter we have heard all the stories and now expect to see how they all turn out. But instead the book ends right as the pilgrims start their final walk down the valley to the Time Tombs. This is rather a slap in the face to the reader – I felt cheated and resolved not to buy the sequel just to spite the author.

The Fall of Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

Ok, obviously I failed in my resolve – but in my defense I found it at a secondhand book store so the author gets nothing from my purchase.

The Fall of Hyperion starts where the previous book so rudely left us but switches gear completely, focusing on what is happening back in the Hegemony as what they thought would be an easy defense of the far-flung planet turns into a fight for survival. The Hegemony is politically fractured, and different groups are scheming for mysterious ends. The CEO of the Hegemony has her own plan involving the pilgrims but she is not the only one.

The Fall of Hyperion sets itself a mammoth task of tying up all the loose ends of Hyperion while telling a fairly convoluted story itself. It is to Dan Simmons’ credit that it pretty much succeeds, although it does get somewhat incoherent at times. The huge audacity of the explanation for some of the strange goings on is almost worth the price of admission itself, most books that try something similar just spin out of control but The Fall of Hyperion comes as close as any to drawing everything together satisfactorily.

The writing in both books is good, and the story moves along at a good pace. The way that certain events and even assumptions about the Hegemony itself are portrayed different depending on the point of view of whichever character the book is following at the moment is particularly well done. There are a few unrealistic points – it seems that just about everyone in the far future has a working knowledge of Keats’ poetry, but they don’t mar an excellent series.

Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing but for goodness sake make sure you obtain both books and read them in order. Hyperion doesn’t have an ending, and The Fall of Hyperion makes no concessions to readers who haven’t read the first book.