This is a collection of tiny reviews of science fiction and fantasy. They are books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length (often because I couldn’t find time). The collection is structured like a blog, with the most recent additions at the top, and dates are the dates of my mini-reviews, not book publication. It began as a comment-string to an identically-titled post on Green Path which drifted away from its environmental theme and into general SF.
Index
• Every Version of You • The Scar • Babel • The Year of the Jackpot • Children of Memory • Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits • Reconstruction • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida • The Anomaly • Flyaway • From Here On, Monsters
Every Version of You
The idea of uploading ourselves to hardware has been a staple of SF for decades. In Grace Chan’s Every Version of You (2022), almost the whole human population uploads to the cloud in the 2080s, to live there in virtual-reality communities. Back in the real world, the global population drops to a few thousands while the necessary computing infrastructure is maintained and extended by androids. “Was this evolution or extinction?” one of the remaining real people asks, and, even more poignantly, “Are they [the uploaded] still us?”
Chan’s focus is identity rather than technology and Every Version of You explores that very well indeed. The issues are too big to treat briefly so I’m not going to try – I’m just going to recommend Every Version.
(1.6.24)
The Scar
The Scar (2002) is set in the world of Perdido Street Station, China Mieville’s breakthrough second novel. It’s a completely separate story, however, set mostly on a floating city. It resists categorisation but I will call it epic steampunk with magical elements. Whatever it is, it’s very good. Iron Council, the third of Mieville’s novels set in the same world looks good, too
(30.4.24).
Babel
Babel (2022) by R.F. Kuang is an alternate-history novel presented as fantasy. The fact that the novel’s central characters meet and bond as first-year students of magic makes Oxford in the 1830s look like a grownup version of Hogwarts: so far, so generic. Never mind; the fantasy aspects will attract readers who wouldn’t pick up a straight historical novel and this one will do them good.
Kuang’s main concern is anti-colonialism. Babel eviscerates the British Empire via the protagonists’ political awakening. Its subtitle, on its title page but not on its cover, articulates its mood. In full, it is Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.
