"Rainbows End" Vernor Vinge

Back to hard Science Fiction.  Or on the surface anyway.  I enjoyed this book immensely because it was multi layered and enthralling.  On the surface it is an exploration of what ifs.  What if Alzheimer's could be cured. What if you could be made young again.  What if what mattered was the ability collate rather than create.  It creates a near future which is complex and different to where a lot of people see us going, and then weaves through two different story threads.  One thread is the story of fighting terrorism in the future, the other is a story of personal redemption and second chances.  The two are blended together very well indeed.

This book posits ideas without even stating them obviously.  Neuroplasticity is a given, without ever being mentioned and plays a central though hidden role in the narrative.  The importance of love and community is one of the biggest lessons you could draw from this novel, but nowhere is said.  The messages, the ideas, the statements of Vinge are subtle; they are simply woven into the thread.

I will definitely read more by this writer, who falls on the hard sf side of the genre.  If you like hard sf and technobabble, give it a whirl.

So something different.  I have already reviewed a book that was co-authored by George R R Martin, which I liked a lot.  He is definitely worth reading for the stuff he writes, but how about the stuff he edits.

Wild cards was recommended to me by a friend, he only managed to get  a copy through a library in Elliot Lake, which is half way to beyond.  I had it for just a few days and absorbed it through my skin.  The basic idea is that a large group of writers came up with a very concrete idea which comes down to an alternative history post world war II and they all wrote stories in that history.  One of the things that makes this great is that if you read it not knowing that each story is a different writer, you could easily believe they are all written by the same person.

The premise for the alternate universe is simple, but complex.  At the end of world war II a flying saucer (yes a flying saucer) lands and a guy gets out who wants to be taken to the leader.  Unfortunately, he does not really get to see the leader...  and so the other flying saucer he wanted to find (that was loaded with a weapon) does not get found by the good guys.  The bad guys who do find the other flying saucer, with its pilots dead, end up dropping the weapon over New York.  This is bad new for New York.

The weapon is awful and wonderful, the stuff of dreams and nightmares.  A virus that kills most people who catch it and the ones who are left are either blessed with strange powers and/or physical changes, or cursed with bizarre abilities and or deformities.  Aliens have essentially turned the earth into a large lab experiment, and super heros, and villains, are a reality.  The ones who are gifted become known as Aces, the ones with deformities etc are Jokers.  The people with powers are not really super heroes like the kind we are used to though, they are more real, flawed, and still live at the whims of the people in the world around them.

Out of the writers I had only read anything by two of them, the immortal Zelazny and Martin himself who wrote one of the stories.  I enjoyed every one of the stories and am keeping my eyes open for more.  The thread is so strong that if you do not like short stories and prefer the novel you would probably like this.  I did.  Thanks Rich.

Michael Swanwick "The Dragons of Babel"

I have been trying, every so often, to pick up an award winner I have not read.  If they win awards they must be good? Right?  Well Michael Swanwick has picked up several over the years so I thought I would give him a chance.

The lead character goes by the name of Will, which I liked immediately.  The story is basically an adventure yarn that has us follow a young lad who grows into a man while having many adventures.  The twist, if there is one, is that the world in which he is growing up is the realm if Faerie, and he is has human blood and hence no true name.  The realm of Faerie seems to be more dominated by technology than magic and so the whole book is a bit different in the fantasy genre.

The book failed to draw me in and grip me, though it was rich in imagination and detail, they were neither enough to give it the pseudo reality that anyone who reads escapist fiction craves.  The plot seems random, but near the end of the book it starts to make sense, but not enough sense.  I think that as a novel it is perhaps a little bit too bizarre in the picture it paints and the characters it portrays.  I struggled to make sense of the underlying logic, that was its underpinnings, and so was left bereft of comfortable answers to the questions that the novel posed to me.  That being said, this could easily be somebody else's favorite book.  I suspect I simply did not get it, and I will probably give a Swanwick novel another kick of the can, as long as it turns up in a second hand book store.  Unfortunately I would not recommend him to others as of today.