Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

Broken Angels

I read this book in the stupidest way possible and months ago, so keep that in mind when you read this. I got through the first third of the novel and then put it down to read something else and didn't go back to it for several weeks. You can put some stories on hold like that without losing too much ground, slipping easily back into plot and characters. This is not one of those stories. Too many names, motives, and locations, especially with all the body and space hopping that goes on. But it's a fun read and worth your attention, so learn from my mistake.

That being said, I repeat: fun read. Plenty of nifty little concepts, building seamlessly on the universe Morgan created for his main character Takeshi Kovacs in Altered Carbon. I continue to be both creeped out and fascinated by the concept of your consciousness being transportable or containable. When death is so survivable, true ending becomes even more horrific.

Once again, I thought I had the mystery solved fairly on and was happily surprised by the reveal. As a military novel, as a whodunit, and as cyberpunk adventure, Broken Angels succeeds for me. If I'd just gone cover to cover without that break, I might have wound up considering it one of my favorites from last year (and, believe it or not, I read quite a few books in 2011).

By the way, happy new year.

Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch

Camp Concentration

Even thought it was published in the late 60s, this one felt very old school to me. The journal format, the paranoia specifically of a wartime government, even the "voice" all felt very 1984 or Kallocaine to me. Which worked in its favor. I could excuse some stilted description as a stylistic choice, I feel like, rather than sketchy writing.

But I guess "sketchy" really is the word I want to use here. The characters felt like a sketch (especially the one woman). The science - and I use that term loosely - wasn't given any details. The end seemed a little tacked on, barely fleshed.

That being said, not a bad read. It wasn't meant to be realistic, more of an thought exercise. How much are we willing to give up for intellect? How important is it? Health, taste, skill, life? Do they even attain intellect, or just speed? No answers given, but isn't that true of most dystopian literature?

Marching Through Georgia by S.M. Stirling

Marching Through Georgia

I don't know. I just don't. It was written well. It kept me interested. The battle scenes were some of the best I've read. But a book that has me choose between cheering on Nazis or cheering on slave-owners? Not something that comes naturally, even when it's clear that the rest of the series probably deals with some changes of heart among the main slaver characters.

Here's the deal, I am not a history buff. I have a vague understanding of what led up to various American or world wars, but that's it. So I don't get that same thrill that I would guess regular readers of the stuff enjoy from the cleverness of manipulating facts and possibilities into a plausible situation. For me to enjoy work like this, I need a few facts filled in for me and I need characters and a story worth caring about. I'd say I got all three here.

Sea of Glass by Barry B. Longyear

Sea of Glass

This isn't the first one I've read that plays with the idea of the government restricting the number of children a family can have. And it's not the first one to show a group of kids bonding together in a home run by the powers-that-be to combat abuse and their own confinement. But this is definitely the first one in which the battered, raped, orphaned-by-the-state kid winds up, through a lifetime of his own research, agreeing with those in charge and actively working for them right up through the end of the book.

I think SoG will stick with me in same way that The Sheep Look Up has, though it is more sf and less likely. Over and over in these latter day dystopias, the idea crops up that we need to cut back on population to the point that mass killings becomes the answer. Will that happen? Could be, in the fullness of time. I can't imagine feeling that it's moral even then, though.

There's just so much death in this novel, from characters we know and grow to feel close to up through the nameless, faceless masses. And, in the end, is death actually life? Does it save the world, or is it all just pain for the sake of pain? Almost every destructive or horrific action in the book is taken for what the perpetrator considers a positive reason. Revenge for a friend. To prevent wholescale war. In search of affection. Do the means justify the ends? That's not a question that I have the philosophical credentials to answer, in the large scale.

final thought: One of the better ones I've read in the past year and a half, and one I'll pass on to others.

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

The Sheep Look Up

I actually finished this one last Sunday, but I wanted to mull it over a little before writing about it. This is a classic dying-environment near-future novel from the early 70s. The Mediterranean Sea is deader than the Great Salt Lake, most of Africa is defoliated. What few crops that still grow, despite insane levels of pollution from wars and corporate greed, are being eaten at the root by insecticide-resistant pests. Filter masks are the only thing standing between Americans and miserable lung diseases. Dose after dose of antibiotics are necessary to cure minor infections and rampant STDs. All children born in the US have something wrong with them, from minor asthma to terrible deformity. You can't drink the water. You can't eat the food. Hundreds of years of not giving a fuck is coming back around to bite the us in our collective asses.

We're not there yet. Our water's actually doing a little better than it was in 1972. But you want personal air filters? Smell it. You want antibiotic resistant pathogens? Howdy, Mr. Staph Infection. Government brutality, corporate sins, Brunner knew what he was talking about, and it scares the crap out of me.

But without a story, it's all just Future Shock. And damned if he didn't tell the story brilliantly. He used a cut and paste style, short chunks of a dozen people's lives, moving across the world to show the damage and our response to it. The Trainites (predating and foretelling the coming of the Earth Liberation Front) riot and smash in the name of the environment. The rich ignore the damage they cause, even to their own sons and daughters. The middle class just try to stay afloat with water filters and dreams. Starving Africans are poisoned into madness by the food sent from the US to keep them alive. Brunner wasn't afraid to kill off his main characters, either. Nobody's safe when you've got too many rats and not enough maze.

"Leading" the USA is a president known only as Prexy. I hear he was modeled after then-Gov Reagan, but the media quotes from him sprinkled throughout the text sure sound like another leader known for going by a nickname.

On foreign war orphans being adopted by Americans: "I guess if they can't break down the front door they have to sneak around the back."
On a scientific report showing rising IQs in third world countries and falling IQs in the US due to pollution and lack of nutrious foods in developed nations: "Well, if they're so smart why aren't they clever?"
On Hondorans fighting against American invasion: "If you bite the hand that feeds you, you're apt to get a mouthful of fist." And so on.

final thoughts: If you match Gibson's ideas about current and coming technology with Brunner's image of what corporate and national greed and overpopulation can do to the world itself, you've pretty much got my biggest nightmare. How likely is it? Too likely.