Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story is at its best when looked at the widest scope: it tries to tell the story of the whole world of Mars as it comes into contact with humanity and both begin the process of changing each other.

This story plays out in some ways more like a colonial history than a novel. Revolving round the first settlers sent to live on Mars and the struggles that they face as they try to build a society there. The novel is above all concerned with the philosophical restructuring of society as mankind evolves out of the current world order. Several elements of the story are introduced just to these ends, (minor spoiler alert) the most notable being the longevity treatments that allow the characters to live through a much larger span of history of the world. The science, economics and characters of the story are all tools used Kim Stanley Robinson towards envisioning a better future. The characters are more philosophical positions than they are people, and when they have character development that changes their philosophy it is usually forced and serendipitous at the same time.

What I find most interesting about the story is the terraforming efforts and the conflict structured around it. This is the more interesting struggle in the story as it is presented more ambiguously, there are interesting discussions raised about the methods that should be used and whether it is more important to have breathable air or more warmth and how much destruction is necessary to create this human habitable world. Some of the other conflicts in the story seem to fizzle out without much effect such as the briefly mentioned Christianity of one of the characters and her followers. But most disappointingly the climax of this installment of the story arises in the background of the narrative from the faceless capitalist boogeyman and swiftly changes the layout of the setting for the next installment without much action or agency on the part of the viewpoint characters. The capitalist position is never given a voice or given a chance to prove its values: despite the fact that the colonization of Mars is only able to occur in the first place on top of a vast amount of money that was spent to send these colonists and support them in their work towards making Mars livable.

Despite its shortcomings I enjoyed the story a lot, the multiple perspectives that it offered with viewpoint characters changing throughout the story were interesting and enjoyable. The characters were not the main point of the story, but were entertaining and enjoyable even beyond the philosophical positions that they represented. The science and the logistics was intriguing if reliant on hand-waving some significant issues and I loved the descriptions of the clever ways that the colonists used automation, robotics and chemistry to build their shelters and start the beginning of an entire world infrastructure. But the struggle of fighting against the harsh Martian landscape was often disappointingly easy, and the amount of material and starting equipment they are provided with from Earth would be staggeringly expensive to get to Mars. But it is obvious that Kim Stanley Robinson wanted to tell the story about the psychological and cultural changes, not the physical struggles and vast monetary expense incurred.

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Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another exciting adventure story filled with magic, fascinating worldbuilding and a tightly planned plot that culminates with a series of rapid-fire twists and reveals like we have come to expect from Brandon Sanderson. Shadows of Self picks up a year after Alloy of Law left off, it continues some of the plot threads and pays off story elements that had been built at the very beginning of the first book. The turmoil that was building in the city of Elendel as the social unrest and class tensions inherent in an industrialized city with wealthy nobility are stoked by the same shadowy group that Wax and Wayne tangled with in book one, but the events don’t follow directly from the Alloy of Law and many of the questions raised by book one remain open throughout. It is also more firmly tied to the first Mistborn trilogy and we are given some glimpses of the developments that happened between.

Darker than Alloy of Law but still geared as a more fun adventure than some of Sanderson’s more epic works. The book has moments of clever character humor and the cast remains fun and enjoyable throughout: on the archetypal side, but more nuanced and personally motivated than a lot of action characters. Wax and Wayne are entertaining as always and we are are given a look at Wayne’s childhood and learn some about what motivated him to go into the Roughs and that led him to become a Lawman as well as how he started working with Wayne. Steris and Merasi also develop: Merasi moving on from her initial star-struck crush on Wax and Steris gaining some humanity that makes her obsessive planning and social awkwardness endearing.

*Spoilers: Mistborn*

Sanderson’s work as a whole frequently explores the concept of deification. The process of human characters becoming or attaining powers that make them into gods. In this series we are given an interesting perspective on this as the gods of this world were all characters in the previous Mistborn trilogy. It is interesting to see these religions as they have developed over the intervening centuries and it is particularly interesting as we actually get scenes where Sazed in his new form as Harmony interacts with Wax. The situation of a fallible god manipulating his subjects raises questions about free will and predestination that are troubling in this world and it is interesting to see how Sazed has tried to deal with these problems. He makes a good character, but he doesn’t make a very good god. The answers to the problem of pain and the afterlife become unsatisfactory and borderline terrifying when given by a fallible human who is near omnipotent but not omniscient.

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Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Altered Carbon is a post-cyberpunk murder mystery where the mystery is convoluted, all the suspects are guilty in the most complicated way possible and the actions of the characters aren’t directed by personal needs or desires, but by the need to take the plot to as many interesting and seedy locations as possible in the imagined future of the world.

The central premise of the world is that in the future technology makes it possible to implant a piece of hardware referred to as the “cortical stack” at the head of the spinal column. This device captures and retains a digital image of the consciousness of the body and this image can then be off-loaded and transferred to different bodies either synthetic or organic, while criminals and the elderly/poor who can no longer afford to pay for bodies are stored in data mainframes. The economics of this activity is not fully explained, but it seems that bodies are considered to be a public resource as even Catholics who are apparently the only religious group still existent that objects to the use of this technology have cortical stacks installed after birth, they just have a religious waiver that bars the re-installing of the saved image in a new body, also a lot of the plot points and the threat of ‘real death’ if we allow that a digital copy of person is a continuation of that person could be solved by networking wireless and encryption.

I find the idea of digital copies of people to be fascinating for the questions about identity, soul and life that it raises, but this story spends very little time on examining any of the interesting moral questions or philosophical nuances. Instead it uses it as an excuse to indulge in graphic sex, wanton destruction of bodies and virtual torture to maintain a sense of urgency and grittiness and resorting far too often to the main character who is ostensibly acting as a private investigator in the course of the novel inflicting cortical stack destruction or “real death” on various characters, mostly black market bystanders, to keep the tension up. What the story does do is take us to a variety of places inspired by this world. The majority of the action takes place in the San Francisco bay area where the main character is loaded from a offworld transmission from his home planet into a body in the Alcatraz sleeving facility and then visits a variety of places that showcase the gritty underbelly of this future society as he investigates, he visits a wealthy mansion, an AI owned and operated hotel, a futuristic AI monitored police station with virtual holding and interogation, a couple of whore-houses, a black-market body chop-shop, a bloody no-broadcasts fighting ring and the like. It is definitely more of a setting story than anything else.

The main character Takashi Kovacs is a ex-soldier who was recruited in his childhood and given special training to become what they call an Envoy, this is psychological conditioning and mystic training to give him the ability to easily adapt to whatever situation he is put in and collect data and put pieces together to build a picture of the truth from intuition without having to rely on any technological boosts or limitations of the particular mind/body that his cortical stack image is currently loaded into. This is said to make him an excellent diplomat and investigator, but it seems from flashbacks in this novel that the Envoy corp was deployed by the military as a black-ops special forces combat assassins and Kovacs occasionally describes being an Envoy as being trained to let everything that holds you back go and become a mindless killing machine and living weapon. I find the combination of these two skillsets and applications of the Envoy corp to be at odds with each other and would make for an exceptionally poor private investigator in the long run, but it does neatly explain the combination of counter-intuitive plot leaps necessary to put together the pieces of the puzzle in this story and the wanton bloodshed unleashed in the ‘investigation’. I was also dissatisfied with how much the story talked up the Envoy powers but then left Kovacs stumbling around allowing himself to be captured, tortured, immobilized and nearly killed only to be saved by third parties.

The treatment of female characters in this story is reprehensible. In the course of the investigation that Kovacs is hired to do he manages to have sex with pretty much every supporting female character, through no fault of his own. He sleeps with the wife of the guy who hired him because she is super rich and able to buy biotech that makes her all but irresistible and she wants to bribe him to stop the investigation. He then sleeps with the Police detective that first starts trying to stop his investigation and get in his way because he is wearing her boyfriends body while her boyfriend serves a sentence for corruption, she gets angry at him for having sex with the rich woman and then immediately has sex with him and then cooperates with him as he breaks hundreds of laws to complete his investigation. And he he also has a drug fueled something with the bodyguard of the main villain during a brief interlude which then ‘motivates’ her to save his life twice later on in the story.

The writing is decent, in a hard-boiled cyber-noir style. I definitely enjoyed parts of the book, but over all it was a convoluted mess that didn’t attempt to bear out the setting other than indulging the aesthetic of the style.

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale is chilling in its premise and powerful in the way that it uses its imagined future to shine a bright spotlight onto the difficulties of being a woman.

Coming from a conservative background it would be easy for me to take offense at the portrayal of a right wing totalitarian society rising from a Christian-values driven sect to take over America. However that would be counter-productive to understanding the story. The story is flawed as a deconstruction of the religious right in that it presents the consequences of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and ignores the implausibility of transforming Massachusetts of all places into a bastion of religious oppression. But that does not take away from the need for this story to be heard and the power of Atwood’s portrayals of womanhood.

The story shows us primarily how women are treated in the society of Gilead and how they are forced to think about themselves and everyone around them as a consequence of the judgements and perspectives of those around them. The society shapes expectations and hands down punishments that place women in the position of property and forces their value towards their ability to produce children. The writing is powerful and takes care to showcase a variety of ways that the people in this restrictive society act and react to the repression, expectations and societal pressures. Women are shown in various ways bending themselves to the restrictions that are placed on them, joining in the repression, making themselves into nothing and shaping themselves to meet the expectations around them. They are shown to be judged by their reproductive worth, by their purity, by their looks and by their use to men. The story isn’t chilling and heartbreaking because this is something we can look forward to if the religious right were to achieve ascendancy: it is chilling because this is what we do every day in so many little and not-so-little way in the society we live in now.

In reading it I feel like I came to a more full realization of the weight of the difficulties of being a woman.

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