Books: Parasols, AIs, Uploads, Citadels, Dystopias, And Other Weird Tales

[woodwardiocom]

Changeless by Gail Carriger

Second in the steampunky Parasol Protectorate series, in this volume our shapely soulless heroine and her dashing werewolf husband must investigate an outbreak of mundanity affecting the lycanthropes and vampires of London and points north. Airships, tele-kineographs, and Scottish clan politics ensue. Light, but fun, and deftly written, with most mysteries wrapped up, and just enough left over for the sequels. Recommended.

WWW: Watch by Robert J. Sawyer

This is the conclusion of the WWW trilogy, in which a blind girl receives an experimental implant to restore her sight, which also places her in communication with an emergent AI, Webmind. This volume is about Webmind's relationship with the world, which is part adversarial, and part advisory. While there are lots of Author Spiels in here, it's still a good book about technology, ethics, geopolitics, with a dash of high school drama. Recommended.

The Modular Man by Roger MacBride Allen

This was on my potential cull list. It's a minor early-90s novel about the rights of cyborgs, in which a DA decides to use a case of mind-uploading as a test case to deprive such uploads of personhood. It gets mildly interesting in parts, but it hasn't dated too well, and is a bit parochial. (E.g., the arguments about only the rich being able to afford life-extending technology apply most strongly in countries where health isn't socialized.) It's going into my giveaway bin.

Citadel by John Ringo

Second in the Live Free Or Die series, in this volume Earth defends itself against hostile aliens via a big armed asteroid, human ingenuity, and having the author on their side. (Seriously, if the techniques the humans are using work that well, why is the most dangerous alien species around not aware of them? The humans bought all their tech off the rack, for cryin' out loud.) Enjoyable as a space opera, light on logic, and Ringo's libertarian politics are a bit intrusive, but I wasn't bored, and the characters seem real. Mildly recommended.

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Recommended, I believe, by minerva42, this is a brief dystopian novel, which apparently started being standard assigned school reading sometime after I graduated college. The world starts out looking not so bad, until you realize that, in order to maintain order, the government has brutally eliminated all forms of Difference. The last few chapters, for a new father, were hard to read, but nevertheless: Recommended.

Best Of Weird Tales, edited by John Betancourt

An actual Best Of Weird Tales volume would be one of the great anthologies of the genre, with Lovecraft, Robert Howard, Tennesee Williams, Clark Ashton Smith, Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, Bradbury, Wellman, Leiber, Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Sturgeon, and other giants in its pages. This book, however, is the best of Weird Tales, 1988-1994. I was thinking of culling it, but I re-read a few of its stories, and decided I liked them enough to keep it. Plus, it has a dandy Eggleton Cthulhu cover. Mildly recommended.

Comments

[mbarr.livejournal.com]

For some reason I enjoyed the first live free or die more- it semeed to have more meat.

But they're fun books :)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Ringo doesn't seem all that libertarian to me. All three books in that series were considered for the Prometheus Award, but most of us found them a bit too conservative and/or militaristic. On the other hand, some of his scenes with the enlisted people are lively.