Old Man’s War

John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (2005) is his first published novel. Its universe currently has three other books in it and a movie, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, is set to come out in 2012.

The plot starts as follows: On his 75th birthday, John Perry (the main character) visits his wife’s grave and joins the Colonial Defense Forces as a recrui– Oh hell, I’ll just quote the back cover; it actually describes the book in question:

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the army.

The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.

So: we fight. To defend Earth (a target for our new enemies, should we let them get close enough) and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has gone on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity’s resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force, which shields the home planet from too much knowledge of the situation. What’s known to everybody is that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don’t want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You’ll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You’ll serve your time at the front. And if you survive, you’ll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.

John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine-and what he will become is far stranger.

So, you say, apart from the downright miraculous fact that the blurb writer actually read the book, what do you think, Ms Reviewer? I don’t see much of an opinion here.

Well, your wish is my command: This book is friggin’ excellent. (Despite the fact that it is written in first person.) Seriously, words can’t express how well thought out it is. Read it. Now.

All right, all right, the blurb isn’t really all that exciting. However, the really interesting, this-is-what-I-read-it-for stuff is all spoilery, so I cannot enhance your knowledge of the book without taking away some of its shine. Let it just be said that Mr. Scalzi is going on my keep-track list.

On Basilisk Station

On Basilisk Station is the first book in David M. Weber’s cult hit Honor Harrington series.

The book opens with a prologue that has the People’s Republic of Haven’s Hereditary President discuss with his cabinet the military and economic situation. Basically, they have something of an economic problem (they’ve taken over countless worlds recently as well as increased their Basic Living Stipend) and decide to take over Manticore, since one of its wormhole’s termini is in the way of their most advantageous (and economically beneficial) routes of expansion.

Then along comes the first chapter and Honor Harrington. She’s just been assigned to be Captain of HMS Fearless. Unfortunately for her, Lady Sonja Hemphill, Admiral of the Red, has come into power with her… interesting notions of what a battleship’s armament needs. After testing, Honor and the Fearless are banished (the grav lance did not work as well as “Horrible Hemphill” had hoped) to the dumping ground for unwanted officers – Basilisk, the terminus that the Havenites were eyeing in the prologue.

Next, it turns out that the Senior Officer at Basilisk is Honor’s longtime enemy (and attempted rapist), Lord Pavel Young. He then decides that his ship needs urgent refitting and that he absolutely must be there to watch, and leaves Honor with the impossible task of covering the security of all of the system alone, knowing that if she fails, she’d take the blame.

In her astounding success, she stumbles upon a plot on Medusa, Basilisk’s lone inhabited planet, to do something. Now, who’s behind it, how to catch them and why are they doing it?

On Basilisk Station is a crossover of Military Science Fiction and Space Opera. It is also the first book in a series of fourteen so far, plus ten spin-offs, so obviously someone liked it. A lot. The worldbuilding’s solid, too.

Honor does, admittedly, give off a bit of a Mary Sue-ish vibe, and the prologue doesn’t quite fit the book, but watching her succeed in the face of adversity is a bit of a guilty pleasure, and the prologue is the prologue not just to On Basilisk Station, but to the whole Honor Harrington series.

Overall verdict: Recommended for any SF aficionados or people looking for a feel-good type book. I liked it.

Final Days

Final Days is the science fiction author Gary Gibson’s first book in his Final Days series. It was published in 2011.

The story is set in the 23rd Century, after the discovery of a means of travelling across light-years via wormhole. Well, Earth’s also discovered an ancient alien civilization’s remains, but that’s rather classified. They’ve also been bringing in shipments of alien tech, more on that later.

The book opens with Jeff Cairns at one of the aliens’ ruins, set so far forward in time that the stars have burned out. (The wormholes are a form of time travel – they connect t=0 point at, say, Earth, with t=x at some other location.) There, two people – Mitchell Stone and Erich Vogel – fall into a sort of pit. Mitchell soon reappears in the vicinity, sans clothing. (The human explorers had sealed the building and pumped air in.) He is then taken to a government-run laboratory to be examined.

Meanwhile, Saul Dumont is on Earth, trying to get evidence to incriminate a businessman with suspected ties to separatist movements. The operation goes grossly wrong, so his superiors offer him an ultimatum: either go on an undercover mission to find out who of Constantin Hanover’s team is leaking out information, or a dishonorable discharge and a long jail sentance. He is also offered the option to find out who blew up the Galileo gate, thus isolating him from his wife and child.

Our viewpoint then switches to Thomas Fowler and Dr Amanda Boruzov, whose duty is to provide exposition in the form of a briefing of the high command of Earth (executed rather well). It turns out that, in an attempt to predict the future, the people at the nearest colony sent a wormhole gate back to Earth, about a decade into the future. They find only an empty, desolate Earth and Moon, populated only by huge growths. The only human being found is Mitchell Stone, in Luna City and deep in cryosleep.

The reader is then informed (along with the characters) that the first of those growths has sprouted in the Pacific Ocean…

All in all, the book is rather plot-driven, even the exposition flows in nicely, and the language used in clear and understandable. A definite recommendation to all fans of science fiction and to those wanting to discover the genre.

If you discover yourself a fan of Mr. Gibson, he has also written two standalone novels (Angel Stations, Against Gravity) and three books in the Shoal Sequence (Stealing Light, Nova War, Empire of Light). Another book is set to appear in the Shoal Sequence, titled River of Light, and a book set in the same universe as Final Days, titled The Thousand Emperors. Gary Gibson also maintains a blog: http://whitescreenofdespair.blogspot.com/

A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by Ernest Hemingway, set during World War One and with autobiographical elements. It was first published in 1929 and, as one of Hemingway’s works, is considered a classic.

The novel is divided into five books. The first book introduces the main character, Frederic Henry (often called simply Tenente, “Lieutenant”), an American ambulance driver on the Italian front, as well as details his meeting of Catherine Barkley, a British nurse, via his Italian friend Rinaldi. It ends after Catherine and Frederic have begun a relationship and Frederic has been sent to a hospital in Milan due to a wound in his knee inflicted by a mortar shell. The second book is about the growth of Frederic and Catherine’s relationship’s growth (Catherine, being the loving woman she is, had herself transferred to the hospital Frederic would be staying at). It ends with Frederic being sent back to the front and Catherine being three months pregnant. In the third book Mr.Henry returns to his unit on the front, just in time for the Austro-Germans to break through the Italian lines, triggering an Italian retreat.

The actual retreat phase was by far the most interesting part of the book, since there I could actually convince myself that harm could befall these characters. Frederic is with three fellow ambulance drivers, one of whom gets shot by panicky Italians and another surrenders to the Germans. Later, Frederic is taken to the “battle police” (a group of Italians executing officers for “treachery” ) and escapes being shot by jumping into a river. In the fourth book Frederic and Catherine reunite and flee to Switzerland in a rowboat; in the fifth, they live a pleasant, fulfilling life on the Alps until Catherine goes into labor.

Personally, I found this book to be tedious and couldn’t understand why it (or Hemingway’s writing style) could ever be considered excellent. The two main characters were rather bland and personality-less, and their interaction gave me the mental image of two bad actors reading a rather corny script to each other. Also, Hemingway failed hard on making the front seem like a war zone: there was no discernible mention of what was going on sound- and scentwise, and everyone seemed to have forgotten there was a war going on. Part of this could perhaps be attributed to Hemingway having been in a war zone long enough to think that the sounds and smells would be obvious, but even so, his proofreader should have commented on the fact. Almost all of the faults in characterization could be put down to the fact that, apparently, Hemingway tried to make Catherine and Frederic his ideal woman and ideal man, respectively. Ideals are far from realistic and boring to read.

All in all, I would definately not recommend this to anyone who likes books where things actually happen. If you like slow-paced novels about relationships, then sure, why not give it a try?

Foundation

Foundation, by Isaaac Asimov, is the first in his series and arguably his best known work among both sci-fi fanatics and the general appreciator of literature alike. Published in ’51 and steadily holding its high acclaim until the present, it’s become, well, a classic. But I don’t want that to color your vision of this novel. Truly, it is a remarkable story, yet stamping the “classic” label on it is, in my opinion, one of the most forced and artificial things we can do as readers. This goes for any book you pick up- appreciate is as you would any other and criticize it by the same standards. However, there is something to be said for the fact that Foundation has stood the test of time and established itself as one of the most prominent sci-fi novels.

The first book of the Foundation Trilogy follows the rise of the new Galactic Empire, under the scientific capital, The Foundation (on the planet of Terminus). Its success in controlling the surrounding kingdoms is credited to the psychohistoric predictions (a new field of research) of the genius and mastermind mathematician, Hari Seldon. Planning and precalculating the probable paths The Foundation would be likely to take, Seldon- though long deceased- guides The Foundation through different stages of power brought on by the last in a sort of chain-reaction of events. The book is largely told through dialogue, from which arises all other aspects- the plot, settings, characters, and conflicts.

This said, I found the style in which Foundation was written comparable to none. In a sense, long dialogues, most of which concerned galactic politics, grew tedious after a certain point. One who is used to fast-paced thriller novels may not last long under these dense exchanges. But don’t get the wrong idea- skipping over even the smallest section will only leave you confused and lost. The book was written in such a way that while the dialogues may be lengthy, these are what communicate the plot, setting, and characters to the reader and every sentence replaces a paragraph of description. One must marvel at how masterfully this technique was executed, which is perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of the novel.

All criticism aside, I found this book engaging and a refreshing change from what I was used to. With two more books following it, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation, much of it worked to lay the groundwork for the next. Personally, I look forward to continuing on in the series, but I do suggest you pick this book up and decide for yourself. It’s a staple for your bookshelf and a great work of literary genius that will give you a new take on science fiction.

The Illustrated Man

“…you see,’ said the Illustrated Man, “These Illustrations predict the future.’

I said nothing.

‘It’s all right in the sunlight,’ he went on. ‘I could keep a day job, but at night- the pictures move. The pictures change.”

Eighteen illustrations, eighteen tales; each futuristic scene strung together by the shifting pictures and the startling array of arcane images tattooed onto the Illustrated Man’s back. In his collection of stories by the same name, Ray Bradbury tells of the future’s dazzling cityscapes, the outlandish inhabitants of distant worlds, the twisted imagination of humanity, and its horrifying consequences.

The Illustrated Man is largely a collection of short stories, very loosely tied to the opening plot, where our storyteller meets the Illustrated Man- a seemingly ordinary character save for the fact that his arms and back are covered in bizarre images allegedly drawn by a woman of the future. These pictures depict a range of joyous, to unsettling, to downright disturbing subjects with a surreal- yet strangely familiar- tone.

I found this to be an incredibly worthwhile read. The length of each story made them easy to follow and advantageous for my own attention span. While I enjoyed some tales more than others, not a single page was wasted on dull descriptions. Instead, Bradbury plunged straight in to each sub-plot, colorfully and effectively illustrating the setting and characters in under twenty pages. Many stories were laced with what we now consider to be overused clichés, though it’s quite easy to push these aside considering that Bradbury could even be credited with the creation of many of them, being the celebrated writer of science fiction he is. Still, no matter how many martians and spaceships added to the mix, the characters are executed flawlessly to the point that it never even crossed my mind that the themes were so… corny. The end of the book returns to the original setting and takes an unexpected and frightening turn, which ties up the book very neatly and leads the reader with thoughts of bewilderment and a sense of daunting wonder.

This book doesn’t deserve the size of review I’m writing for it. I could walk you through each chapter and marvel at the exotic imagery Bradbury has crafted; but I’d much rather you find someplace to buy this book, and read it.