Bitter Angels is the winner of the 2009 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction.  It’s a space opera/espionage story by Sarah Zettel , published under the pseudonym C.L. Anderson.

Terese Drajeske is a former operative of the Guardians, the organization tasked by the United Earth Government with countering threats to the peace between earth and her many colonies.  She is jolted out of the more peaceful life she has built for herself  by the news that Bianca Fayette, her longtime friend and mentor, has been mysteriously killed while conducting an investigation.  Despite having once sworn that she would never return to the Guardians, Terese agrees to come out of retirement, despite the pleas of her family and the risk that she will destroy the peace and happiness she has found since the devastating events that drove her out of the Guardians the first time.

Terese travels to the Erasmus system, where Bianca died.  Once a prosperous group of settlements, Erasmus suffered an economic collapse after advances in faster-than-light travel made its formerly lucrative position as a shipping hub obsolete.  It’s hereditary rulers maintain their grip on power through a massive system of surveillance and secret police and a crushing system of debt bondage that keeps the bulk of the population in a state of permanent indentured servitude to their rulers.   Though seemingly too impoverished and busy struggling for survival to present a serious threat to outsiders, the Guardians believe that Erasmus is a source of instability and a potentially serious threat to the peace of interstellar civilization.   Terese will have to delve deep into this oppressive, decaying society  to discover just what happened to Bianca, and find out what she had discovered that was worth killing over.

Bitter Angels is a good book, but a somewhat frustrating one.  The book has a strong start, a strong conclusion, and lots of good elements that sometimes felt like less than the sum of its parts due to pacing problems.  After a very effective setup, the story started to drag, spending a lot of time seeming like things were about to get more interesting without doing so.  I liked the premise and the setting enough to keep going, and was ultimately glad I did, but too much of  the time I spent reading felt like something I had to trudge through to get to the payoff.

The book does have considerable strengths.  Erasmus is a very well-done setting, and Anderson does a great job bringing it to life.  There’s an intense sense of decay, fear, and desperation as we see as we see the people of Erasmus struggling to escape their crushing debts to their rulers, while draconian laws, ubiquitous government surveillance, and the power of the secret police to create a nearly Stalinist level of paranoia.

I thought Therese’s emotional struggle as she is torn between loyalty to her dead friend and her promise to her family that she would never go back to the Guardians was very well-done.  Therese’s relationship with her husband is a particularly strong element here, as Therese faces the possible dissolution of her life’s great source of stability.  Despite his relatively modest time on stage, her husband is a well-drawn, sympathetic character; his importance to Therese, and hers to him, comes through strongly, and his pain and fear at the thought of his wife returning to a career that nearly killed her and left her psychologically shattered is palpable.  Similarly, the portrayal of the sacrifices made by characters from Erasmus as they struggle through their lives in a dehumanizing, spirit-crushing society was very effective and added a lot.

Overall, I would recommend Bitter Angels for fans of science fiction, provided you’re willing to be patient with some parts that drag in the middle.  The setting and premise work well, the characters are very effectively done, and the conclusion has an emotional charge that ultimately makes it worthwhile.

One of the things I love about science fiction, and especially hard science fiction, is that it rejects conventional presumptions about what it’s proper for fiction to be about and treats things like science, logical and creative extrapolation, system-building, and- more generally- reason as worthwhile subject matter in their own right.  Greg Egan (Diaspora, Permutation City, etc.) is an unabashed practitioner of science fiction in that vein, so I was quite pleased when his new novel Incandescence arrived.

The story follows two characters in the far, far future.  Rakesh is a citizen of the Amalgam, a galaxy-spanning civilization home to an immeasurable host of organic beings, artificial intelligences, and uploaded personalities.  An adventurous man (or male-identifying uploaded intelligence), he has grown restless living in a society that tamed the galaxy and seemingly discovered everything that can be discovered eons before he was born.

The story begins when he is approached by a stranger named Lahl, who tells him that she has evidence of a species unknown to the Amalgam, deep in the galactic core.  The core is the domain of the Aloof, an enigmatic civilization that has spurned the Amalgam’s attempts to communicate for millions of years.  Despite this, they broke their silence long enough to show Lahl- who was taking a shortcut through Aloof space to cut a few thousand years off her travel time- a meteor containing fossilized DNA-based cells that belong to no known known species, and that must have originated in the core itself.

For their own incomprehensible reasons, the Aloof have charged  Lahl with the task of finding a “child of DNA,” a member of a species born from the smae panspermia that gave rise to the sample and to many of the species of the Amalgam, willing to help seek out the DNA’s source.  As a human, Rakesh fits the bill.  Presented with this opportunity, Rakesh agrees to enter the domain of the Aloof in search of the discovery he thought he’d never have a chance to make.

Roi is an alien living in a strange world of tunnels called the Splinter, where the strength and direction of of gravity depends on your location and everything is brilliantly lit by the all-pervading light they call the Incandescence.  She lives a normal life, tending crops nourished by the light and heat of the Incandescence with the rest of her work team, until the day she meets Zak in the weightless heart of the splinter, the Null Line.  Too old, eccentric, and unhealthy to be targeted for recruitment by a work team, he spends his time trying to understand the nature of their home, seeking lost records and studying the shifting patterns of weight around the Splinter.  Like everyone she knows, the question of why their world is as it is is something she had never taken an interest in before, but her encounter with Zak awakens, for the first time in her life, to understand.  So overwhelming is her curiosity that it overpowers her natural biochemical bonds joining her to her work team,  and she begins returning to the null line to learn more from Zak.  Together, starting with simple experiments about motion in the weightless environment of the null line, they begin probing into the nature of their strange home.  As time passes, their discoveries lead to an ominous conclusion- the Incandescence is not the safe, eternally static place they had thought, and their growing understanding may be the only way to preserve the Splinter from catastrophe.

I really enjoyed Incandescence, but I have to be a bit cautious in recommending it.  If you like hard science fiction that really delves into the science, I recommend it strongly.  If you don’t, you’re likely to find it rather dry.

For those who do like especially science-heavy hard science fiction, this book has much to recommend it.  Egan creates two radically different but fascinating environments in the Amalgam and the Splinter.  I liked the way the Amalgam is introduced- it initially seems like a strange but somewhat recognizable future, but it quickly becomes apparent just how alien it really is.  Despite that, it didn’t have the chilly, eerie feeling that I often associate with settings involving the extremely distant future, posthumanity, and/or large-scale interstellar civilizations without faster-than-light travel.  I enjoy that feeling, generally speaking, but Incandescence’s Amalgam was a pleasant change of pace.  The Amalgam characters were generally not delved into deeply, and their psychology and mode of existence was quite alien in some ways, but to me their personalities and interactions had a sense of good-natured warmth to them that I don’t often see, and I quite enjoyed that.

The Splinter is a fascinating creation that should intrigue people who like science fiction about life in environments radically different from our own in the vein of Hal Clement, Robert Forward, or Stephen Baxter.  There have been many books about bizarre environments, but incandescent is the first SF novel I’m aware of to use a location- an object closely orbiting a black hole- where the effects of relativity can be readily seen in day-to-day life.

One of the things I enjoyed was that the book is about science not just as an existing body of knowledge, but as a process of learning and discovery.  Again, this is not the sort of thing that can be recommended for people of every taste, but I found it very satisfying to follow Roi as she  learned the underlying laws behind her world, gradually seeing things that seemed meaningless, baffling, or arbitrary come together into a coherent, comprehensible whole.  Egan is also quite ingenious in showing ways that intelligent beings might be able to gain a sophisticated understanding of physics in an environment where the science that drove so much of it’s advancement on Earth, astronomy, is impossible.

Greg Egan’s Incandescence is a fine book for devotees of hard science fiction.  It’s definitely not suited to everyone, but if you enjoy far-future SF that takes science seriously and want a story that conveys the excitement of discovery in an unusual way, Incandescence is well worth your time.  For some neat background materials, check out the Incandescence section at Greg Egan’s homepage.

Before he turned to writing, Graham Sharp Paul served as a commissioned officer in the British and Australian Navies, and then worked in finance and business consulting until he retired to write in 2003.  His debut The Battle at the Moons of Hell marks his entry to the field of military science fiction.  It is the first book in Paul’s “Helfort’s War” series, which thus far also includes The Battle of the Hammer Worlds and The Battle of Devastation Reef, though it still stands alone well as a self-contained story.

I read this book almost purely by chance: I was at the bookstore, didn’t see anything that I particularly wanted, and finally picked it because I didn’t want to feel like I’d wasted the trip by going home empty handed.  Happily, my choice paid off.  Score one for the sunk-cost fallacy.

The Battle at the Moons of Hell focuses on the story of Michael Helfort, newly commissioned Junior Lieutenant in the fleet of the Federated Worlds, one of the preeminent polities in human space.   Helfort is assigned to the DLS-387, a small reconnaissance vessel.  DLS-387 is traveling on a routine patrol when it receives urgent news: a Federated Worlds civilian liner, the Mumtaz, has been hijacked and the advanced terraforming equipment it carried stolen by agents of the Hammer of Kraa, a brutal theocratic regime that has been a frequent enemy of the Federated Worlds.  An informant in the Hammer government has revealed that Mumtaz’s passengers and crew have been taken to the world of Hell, a barely-habitable planet where the Hammer puts prisoners, dissidents, and heretics to work in nightmarish labor camps.

DLS-387 is ordered to change course for Hammer space for a covert reconnaissance flyby that will provide intelligence for a Federated Worlds rescue mission and retaliatory strike.  Penetrating so deep into enemy space will be dangerous, and if DLS-387 succeeds the larger conflcit with the Hammer still lies ahead. The Federated Worlds cannot allow hostile powers to abduct and enslave its citizens – and Helfort cannot leave his mother and younger sister, passengers on the Mumtaz, to die hundreds of light-years from home.

The Battle at the Moons of Hell is a promising debut for Paul. The action is exciting and extremely tense. Paul does a nice job of providing a panoramic view of events, moving from Helfort and his crewmates at the front to the imprisoned passengers of the Mumtaz to the highest levels of government on both sides.  Paul also largely avoids resorting to the sort of large lumps of exposition that many people find frustrating about military science fiction and space opera.
My primary complaint is that the characterization of Michael Helfort himself is lacking; he is defined enough to make me care about what happens to him, but he still seemed rather flat.  Most of the secondary characters suffered a similar problem.  (I should note that this aspect improves considerably in the subsequent books.)

I thought the action scenes were great, on the other hand.  Paul’s descriptions of battle do a good job of bringing out the sheer size of space, with ships exchanging salvos that take several minutes to reach their targets, while the crews hold their breath as ship defenses duel with vast clouds of rail gun-propelled metal slugs to decide the ship’s fate.  Paul exploits this to the hilt, and generates a tremendous sense of tension from it.  His details and description are highly effective and give Paul’s description of space combat a ferocious tone that feels almost physically punishing.

The setting is somewhat lightly sketched in, but still interesting.  In his portrayal of the Federated Worlds, Paul does some interesting things with the idea of a society where neural implants are widespread and people can download data (including the equivalent of mail and phone calls) directly into their brains, carry recordings of everything they see and do in their heads, or have behavioral blocks installed.  I especially liked the book’s portrayal of the internal politics of the Hammer of Kraa; its almost Stalinist brutality and ruthless, bloody purges as members of the ruling elite struggle for dominance did a great job of evoking an utterly nightmarish society.

I liked The Battle at the Moons of Helland would recommend it to fans of space opera and military science fiction in the vein of authors like David Weber.  The next two books in the series thus far, The Battle of the Hammer Worldsand TThe Battle of Devastation Reef, are also worth reading.   Graham Sharp Paul is a promising addition to military science fiction, and I look forward to seeing more from him.

(Note: This is a revised and expanded version of a review originally written for Crucial Taunt.)

Over at the SFWA blog, Nisi Shawl writes on the subject of writing about characters from races and cultures other than your own.  It’s a great article and has some excellent ideas for improving one’s own knowledge and insight.

The number of aspiring authors who shy away from writing about characters of other races because they believe themselves unable to do so well is strange, since there is probably no genre that spends more time with people or beings unlike the author than science fiction.  Jack McDevitt is not an archaeologist.  Elizabeth Moon is not autistic.  Iain M. Banks is not a machine intelligence.  David Drake is not a psychologically reconditioned rapist.  Neal Asher is not an alien space-faring biomechanical sphereoid with a penchant for strange, cryptic pronouncements.  Dan Simmons is not a Jewish college professor who has spent the last twenty years grappling with his religious beliefs while watching helplessly as his beloved daughter ages backwards into infancy.

Writing about characters of another race or culture is not an insurmountable challenge compared to this.  There is, of course, an added degree of risk if it is done badly, in terms of causing real-world offense or anger, that doesn’t apply to portraying the inhuman; Peter Watts need not fear being upbraided by space-going philosophical zombies who thought the aliens in Blindsight were offensive stereotypes.

Anyway, I definitely recommend checking out Shawl’s article.  Discussion of racial and cultural diversity in science fiction topic tends to be vague and platitudinous,  so it’s great to see more writing about the nuts and bolts of actually doing something about it.

It is widely agreed, I think, that the most prominent technological trend generally unanticipated by science fiction is the enormous growth in computer technology.  This results in older science fiction often having technology that seems like a mismatched jumble of the astonishing and primitive: interstellar civilizations with faster-than-light travel where microfilm is the state-of-the-art in data storage is a common example.  I’m not bothered by it, but it certainly jumps out.  (And there are exceptions, including what is arguably the most prescient SF story ever- Murray Leinster’s astonishing “A Logic Named Joe,” which predicted home personal computers, the internet, search engines, and internet telephones.  Not bad for a story published in 1946, when a cutting-edge computer cost more than five million inflation-adjusted dollars and weighed 30 tons.)

What brought this to mind was an amusing example I was recently reminded of.   A friend of mine caught the movie Short Circuit 2 on television few days ago.  Not exactly rigorously hard science fiction, but it was, in its time, one of the more prominent popular depictions of the idea of artificial intelligence.  (And perhaps the high-water mark of the  obsession with wacky comic relief robots that loomed like a vast black shadow over much of the 1980s. )  Protagonist Johnny 5, a self-aware robot with at least human-level intellect, boasts at one point that he possesses “5oo hundred megabytes of memory.”

I’m typing this on the computer I use for work and most other things writing-related.  It’s a few years olds, and was not a top-end model even when it was made.  It has 160 gigabytes of memory.   I have a 1 gigabyte USB flash drive shorter than my pinky finger.  I paid about $20-30 for it a few years ago; compared to what you can get now for the same price, 1 gigabyte is nothing impressive.

A figure intended to make audiences think “amazing computer technology from a secret government lab” when I was a child is now dwarfed by cheap consumer electronics you can buy in a Wal-Mart clearance aisle and carry in your shirt pocket.  It makes me wonder what technological trends (and soical trends, for that matter) present-day science fiction is missing, and what glaring omissions will strike readers 40 years from now as the equivalent of “Wow, 500 megabytes!” or interstellar starships that calculate their trajectories with microfilm records and a slide rule.  If anyone has any guesses, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve reviewed Michael Flynn’s space opera The January Dancer at BSCreview.  Check it out.

I’ve been kept busy lately by some work-related stuff, along with the seven or eight distinct illnessess that have all apparently taken up residence in my digestive system simultaenously and started battling for supremacy, but I’m back in action.  Look for new reviews both here and at BSCreview very soon.

Here’s some very good news, via SF Crowsnest: Solaris Books has found a buyer.  It was announced a few months ago that their parent company, the Black Library, was going to start focusing solely on its primary purpose as the fiction-publishing arm of Games Workshop.   Solaris’ new owner is British game developer Rebellion Developments.  Rebellion has experience with publishing, through creating their own SF/Fantasy/Horror imprint Abaddon Books and by acquiring seminal weekly comics anthology 2000 AD and RPG/tabletop game company Mongoose Publishing.  2000 AD is the source of Judge Dredd, among other things, and Mongoose is the publisher of the current edition of the legendary Traveller and the new RPG based on David Drake’s Hammers Slammers stories, so presumably the new guys in charge know their way around the SF field.

(Though their greatest accolade may be this line from the Rebellion Developments Wikipedia page:  “Their first known title was Alien Vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar, which was considered one of the few good games for that console.”  Seldom has a single sentence been so coldly factual and hilariously brutal at the same.  Poor Jaguar.  I guess the world just wasn’t ready for your 64 bits of processing power and godawful controllers.)

I’ve really come to like Solaris over the past year or so, and it’s through Solaris that I’ve discovered a number of authors, such as Andy Remic, Eric Brown, and Jeffrey Thomas.  I’m very happy to see it will continue.

David Weber finally has a proper website, and an extremely nice one at that.  I love an extensive author site, especially one like this that includes a lot of Weber’s own commentary on his books.  It’s unfortunate that more writers don’t have something like this, since books- and especially SF books- are precisely the kind of thing that can be greatly enriched by supplementary information for a look into the thoughts of the creator.

Tobias Buckell has a post about his experience as a lecturer at Shared Worlds camp, a creative writing program for teenagers with a focus on worldbuilding.  It sounds extremely cool, though reading about it brings back some unfortunate childhood memories about my disastrous week at Lutheran summer camp.  (Jason Voorhees is never around when you need him.)

This is a real shame: Jim Baen’s Universe magazine is shutting down next year.  Editor Eric Flint explains here.

Grasping for the Wind is having a second iteration of its popular Book Reviewers Linkup Meme.  If you have a blog about science fiction or fantasy and want to add it, or just want to see what is probably the most exhaustive list of SF blogs ever compiled, check it out.

John Meaney is known for his work in the science fiction field, most notably the Nulapeiron sequence (Paradox, Context, Resolution).  They are well-worth reading for their combination of an imaginative and unusual setting, scientific speculations, and furious action.  With Bone Song (Hardcover, Paperback ,Kindle), he enters the genre of dark fantasy, and yet also retains the virtues of the science fiction writer along the way.  The follow-up, Black Blood (Dark Blood in the United Kingdom), came out earlier this year.

Bone Song is set in Tristopolis, a city covered by a perpetually dark, purple skies that rain mercury, inhabited by humans both living and undead, as well as by incorporeal beings called wraiths.  Its technology is a bizarre amalgam of machinery and the supernatural, kept running by underground “necroflux” reactors that generate power from the bones of the dead.

The main character of the story is Lieutenant Donal Riordan, an officer in the Tristopolis police.  He is assigned to the task of protecting an international opera star making a stop in Tristopolis.  The energies of the thoughts, feelings, and memories of humans during life become embedded in their bones, and the bones of great artists are prized for the ecstatic experiences they can provide.  A mysterious organization has begun murdering famous artists and stealing their bodies, and the visiting diva may be their next target.

What starts as an assignment to protect a single woman soon expands up into something much bigger as Riordan is recruited into a special federal task force after narrowly surviving a sorcerous attack on his mind.  There he meets Xelia, a free wraith, and Commander Laura Steele, the group’s undead leader.  They are dedicated to pursuing the Black Circle, a secret society with an interest in the bones of the dead, agents all over the world, and members in the highest levels of Tristopolis society.

I greatly enjoyed Bone Song.  John Meaney creates a truly fascinating and bizarre setting in Tristopolis.  The book’s tone is interesting and a bit atypical.  The mood of Tristopolis is relentlessly dark and sinister, hanging oppressively over everything, and the premise of the plot is quite grim.  However, the story itself, with its combination of mystery and fast action, is intensely energizing and feels almost exuberant at times.  The book does a nice job of being extremely dark in setting and premise, and sometimes quite sad, without feeling dreary or depressing.  I don’t see that sort of contrast very often, but Meaney does it well.

Much of this comes from Meaney’s style of writing, which gives events, and especially rapid or physically intensive events, a tremendous sense of raw immediacy.  In the book’s more intense sections, Riordan’s actions and thoughts often felt as if they were being poured directly into me, without the mediation of words.  As in the Nulapeiron trilogy, Meaney’s own background in the martial arts definitely shows, not only in his technical knowledge but in the way he evokes a state in which events move faster than the fully conscious mind can keep up with.

The setting is very imaginative, and straddles typical genre distinctions in an interesting way.  The supernatural (at least by real-world standards) is so ubiquitous in Tristopolis society that much of it feels more like technology.  Necroflux energy harvested from the memories and emotions of the dead powers the city like electricity.  Wraiths are bound to complex machines like automobiles and elevators to give animation and at least limited capacity for thought.  The newly dead can be revived as the undead through a procedure that has supernatural elements but resembles surgery more than anything else.  Even victims of sorcerous mental attacks undergo medical treatment and rehabilitation analogous to real-world physical therapy.  Thus, while Bone Song is dark fantasy, in many ways it could also be described as science fiction set in an animistic universe.

I would strongly recommend Bone Song for anyone who likes intense, action-heavy stories or unusual worldbuilding.  I think it could appeal to a number of different groups: fantasy fans looking for something different from the usual high fantasy settings, science fiction fans who want to see a science fiction-influenced take on a world with some very different underlying principles, and perhaps people who like modern/urban fantasy (e.g. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books) and want a story in a more distant and unusual setting.  John Meaney has a great talent for truly creative imaginary worlds, and I look forward to seeing what he does next.

This sounds very interesting: VIZ Media, the popular manga publisher, has created a new venture called Haikasoru dedicated to translating Japanese science fiction books into English.  The first releases are planned for next month.  Haikasoru editor Nick Mamatas has an entry on the Haikasoru blog about the Japanese science fiction field and how it compares to SF in the English speaking world.  Definitely sounds interesting.

Besides my interest in the books themselves, I’m excited by the potential this may have for bringing more readers to the field, especially younger readers.  Most big bookstores I’ve been to have the Science Fiction/Fantasy section next to the manga.   When school isn’t in session, the manga section is usually quite busy, in large part with kids at or within a few years of the age I was at when I became a serious SF reader.  Japanese science fiction marketed by a manga company has all sorts of potential for creating long-term fans.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this turns out.