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Sentient Secrets is a short story that packs a lot into a few pages. It’s a teaser for the novel Sisters Arcana. The protagonist is Lulu Wren, whose company mandates her to do a journaling project with an AI assistant.

At first, Lulu finds the exercise tedious, stupid, and cringeworthy. But soon, after gathering enough input from her, the AI starts producing new entries in her voice. More than that, it soon seems that entries in the journal have predictive power.

It was a compelling concept, and made me interested in reading Sisters Arcana. I’ll probably pick that one up at some point.

I am, as you may have noticed, extremely interested in non-linear conceptions of time. Try reading about the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment sometime. It doesn’t actually demonstrate that information can be sent backward in time. However, it takes advanced knowledge of quantum mechanics to explain why it doesn’t demonstrate that, which means that it’s close enough to time-travel for government work.

Time-travel is a bit mind-bending to think about, and that is probably why it’s one of those concepts best suited to machine minds, which are entirely comfortable with hallucinations and things that sound cool but make no logical sense to those of us made out of meat.

This kind of techno-sorcery is what is going on in Sentient Secrets, and if this blend of esoteric mysticism and modern computer technology doesn’t put you in mind of the CCRU, well… congratulations, that means you’re a normal, well-adjusted person. How did you even find this blog? Were you perchance led to it by The Almighty Algorithm?

Well, like Hunter S. Thompson said, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” The computer age is proving to be a weird one indeed, and Sentient Secrets is a concise distillation of that weirdness.

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Literary theorist Georg Lukács said that novels were “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given.”

Well, who am I to argue? But let me just say that I think it is hard to capture all that in a single novel, unless maybe you’re doing it the Russian way. But the short story collection, now there’s a way to capture “the totality of life.”

Pacotti is like Mark Paxson and a few other gifted writers of literary fiction who have this extraordinary ability to inhabit the heads of different people and show the world from their perspective. This collection is a beautiful mosaic of unique characters in varied circumstances, all written with care and empathy. Whether it’s the wife of an alcohol smuggler in Tehran, a pair of rebels in a dystopian Hong Kong, or a young boy growing up believing he will never be as brilliant as the rich kids in his class due to their chemically-induced mental advantage, Pacotti invites us to walk around in many different shoes.

Of course, I knew of Pacotti first from his work on the dystopian video game Deus Ex, and later from his prophetic neo-noir cyberpunk horror thriller Demiurge. Both of these are absolute classics of 21st-century sci-fi, and each share many things in common with the stories found in this volume.

The most obvious common element among these stories is… drugs. Not just the typical illegal kind (though those certainly show up) but all manner of mind-altering substances, both real and, at least so far, imagined. Pacotti returns again and again to the subject of chemically changing the patterns of the brain.

And yet, at the same time, he clearly isn’t just a materialist who sees consciousness as just an accidental product of a bubbling stew of chemicals. There is an implicit human core that is somewhere beyond the reach of the drugs, and that’s the part that makes Pacotti’s work so haunting. Over and over, we meet characters exposed to the most fundamentally anti-human and unnatural circumstances, but what makes the story work is the undeniable basic humanity struggling to break through.

I haven’t done a very good job describing these stories, and I am sorry for that. The power of them is a hard thing to concisely summarize; it’s more like a feeling that gradually steals over you as you read, and find yourself rooting for (or against) his vividly-drawn characters.

I liked all the stories, but probably my top three are “Evil Spirits Travel in Straight Lines”, the eerily prescient “Conversations with the Noösphere” and “Incantation.” All the stories are available on the author’s website, so I encourage you to check these out, and read the rest if you enjoy them as much as I did. Pacotti is one of the great sci-fi authors of our era, and when the history of fin de millénaire literature is written—if it is written—it will be impossible not to include his name in it.

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The great Noah Goats once told me something I’ve never forgotten. “Berthold,” he said to me, “books lead on to books, sometimes in strange ways.” Then he closed up his butterfly knife and walked away into the darkness.

Okay, I’m embellishing. But he really did tell me that. And he was right. Today’s book is a case in point: it’s written by one of the authors of Best, which I reviewed last week. Reading another book by an author of a book you’ve enjoyed may not seem that strange, but what piqued my interest is that while Best, is a light-hearted rom-com satire of academia, Kenai is military science-fiction.

This got my attention. There aren’t many authors who dabble in genres as diverse as that. (Full disclosure: I have also written a light-hearted rom-com satire of academia and military science-fiction. Now are you starting to get an idea of what kind of eccentricity it takes? 🙂 )

Kenai tells the story of Jess Amiko, an ex-space marine trying to forget her past. During her time in the service, she was railroaded into serving a prison sentence for war crimes. They really gave her the Breaker Morant treatment, minus the firing squad, obviously. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t have plenty to feel justifiably guilty about! She does, and… she does.

Once she is finally released from prison, Amiko works as a private security guard on the world of Kenai, assisting with an archeological dig to uncover the ruins of a lost civilization.

Naturally, things don’t go smoothly. Amiko soon finds herself under attack by mercenary thugs, meeting sentient trees, and generally having a whole bunch of experiences that make her question her own sanity.

Interwoven with all this are flashbacks to her time in the service and in prison, including the lengthy counseling sessions she underwent as part of her rehabilitation. These scenes serve to flesh out her character, and also serve another purpose…

…a purpose which I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge. You see, about halfway through the book, there’s a very clever plot twist that forces you to reevaluate a good deal of what came before. And after. But I can’t explain what that is without spoiling it, and that would be very wrong. Now, I could it put it behind a spoiler tag, ’tis true. But in these days of AI combing through everything to slap together answers for inquiring minds, I can’t guarantee my spoiler might not find its way into some LLM-generated reply to a query, and I wouldn’t want that. Therefore, it’s very important I not talk about some of the things that happen in this book.

(Curiously, it occurs to me that not talking about some of the things that happen is also a key plot element in the book itself. There appears to be some sort of recursive hyperstition effect at work in this text which affects not only the book itself, but also writings about the book. But probably best not to think about it too hard. “How quaint the ways of Paradox! / At common sense she gaily mocks!”)

But anyway, what I can say is that this is a fine MilSciFi adventure. Who doesn’t love the trope of a flawed protagonist on a quest for redemption? Especially if that quest for redemption involves the liberal use of POWERED ARMOR!

Gad, I love powered armor. Any story is automatically rendered better by the inclusion of powered armor. Remember how like 15 years ago there was a fad for rewriting classic works of literature but with zombies? That really never moved me, but if they did it with powered armor? Pride and Prejudice and Powered Armor even sounds better!

In short, I unhesitatingly recommend Kenai to anyone who enjoys science-fiction and clever, mind-bending plot twists. Be sure not to skip over the author’s note at the end if you’re a writer, it reveals interesting details about the process.

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There’s nothing like a good redemption story. And if that redemption story also happens to feature space pirates and interstellar battles, so much the better!

Sol Linocass is a divorced dad down on his luck. His attempts to win back the favor of his ex-wife invariably seem to go sideways. He can’t hold a job, and he’s an alcoholic. His life, in short, is going down the tubes, and his dream of a better future thanks to his skill as a pilot from hours in simulators doesn’t seem likely to materialize any time soon.

But one day he stumbles across top secret information hidden in some scrap he hauled in from the junkyard. Sol may not be the best decision-maker in the world, but he is wise enough to know just what the government would do to get their hands on such data. So, he decides to flee as fast as he can, by joining up with his sister Trudy and her rag-tag crew of space pirates.

Trudy is the opposite of Sol in many ways; competent, organized, and in command of her life. She makes it very clear to Sol that once they leave port, he’s not her little brother, he’s just a member of her crew. She stops just short of making a “row well, and live” speech, but it’s very clear who’s in charge here.

I’m not usually one to want prequels or retellings or things like that, but I would love to read the story of this book told from Trudy’s perspective. She’s a fantastic character, especially once you know the whole story, and can appreciate all the different concerns she’s required to balance.

What follows once Sol joins the crew is a spacefaring adventure full of danger, intrigue, political-machinations, and double-crossing. It reminded me a little of Frank Herbert’s sadly neglected novel The Dragon in the Sea, about a submarine crew where everyone suspects everyone else of being a double agent. With everything that’s at stake, Sol never knows who can be trusted. (In the sage advice of Natalie Portman in My Blueberry Nights: “You can’t even trust yourself.”)

But in the end, everybody has to put their faith in something; and ultimately that’s the decision Sol is forced to make under the highest pressure imaginable.

There are so many things I could praise in this book: the obvious points are the compelling and twist-filled plot, and the vivid, memorable characters. It reminded me of a Carrie Rubin novel in that regard. (And yes, there is even a bit of a medical subplot to it.)

A less obvious, but equally important quality is how Holtschulte handles the world-building. World-building is key in a science fiction story since, you know, it’s set in a different world.

Tall Boy Sun contains a bare minimum of world-building. It conveys just enough information about the setting that we can follow what’s happening, and not a bit more. There are no info-dumps or long-winded expositions here, which is perfect.

When you read an exposition-heavy section in a character-driven novel, it has the effect of taking you out of the moment, and reminding you that you are just reading a story. For comparison, imagine reading a novel set in the present day: if it weighed you down with a bunch of needless backstory about politics and history of our own world that wasn’t relevant to the story, it would be distracting and even a little confusing. You would be asking, “why would the author need to tell me this?”

We accept more explaining about the world and setting in sci-fi or fantasy novels, but how refreshing it is to read one that feels like it really is of a piece with its setting! Tall Boy Sun‘s world is so well-built that it ceases to feel like it was built at all, and feels as if the writer truly inhabits the world being described, and simply penned a novel set in it.

There are many more praiseworthy things in this book, such as Trudy’s colorful crew, and the sinister antagonist Gilbert Bane, who is a mixture of Boba Fett, the Red Baron, and the Dread Pirate Roberts. But, it’s more fun if you can just discover the world and denizens of Tall Boy Sun for yourself. I highly recommend this book, even if sci-fi isn’t one of your typical genres. It is first and foremost a book driven by its characters, who are as well-crafted and memorable as any you’ll ever meet.

Now if we can only get a spin-off about the adventures of Captain Trudy…

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You remember the other week when I reviewed that “biography” of Baron Ungern-Sternberg and talked about how it was cool to read a book that didn’t over-explain things to the reader? Well, this book is like that too, only it’s an alternate history story rather than a biography.

You can tell things are different in this world. The story is about the Energy Wars of 1994, when terrorists of unclear affiliation attacked the Johnson Space Flight Center.

General Gus Grissom, who apparently did not die (I think–see below) in the Apollo 1 program in this timeline, is heading the response to the attack. Under his command is the narrator of our story, Peter Caudell, with the framing device of Caudell telling the story many years later to his daughter.

It’s a very short book, taking only about ten minutes to read, but it packs a lot into those ten minutes. Mostly raising more questions than answers. Which is good if you’re like me. My motto is that the best books are the ones that leave you questioning what’s even real.

Still… it would have been nice to have things a bit more fleshed out. The author does include an Afterword which explains some things, but even the explanations raise questions. For example, there’s a note about where the clones of Stalin are located in this alternate world.

This is why I included the parenthetical note about Grissom above. There are multiple references to clones throughout the story, in a way that suggests they’re important, but I could never figure out exactly what the deal was with them.

But in a way, this makes the story feel more authentic. I feel like clones were all the rage as the sci-fi trope of the 1990s. I know I was a big fan of clone-related stories when I was a kid. AI and robots and simulation theory are all right for these young people with their short pants and their comically oversized lollipops, but me, I’m from the Old School. Give me that old-time warehouse with rows of clones in test tubes. If it’s good enough for the Galaxy of Fear, it’s good enough for me.

Anyway, back to the story: it’s well-written but kind of incoherent. But I’m strangely okay with that, because it really does feel like reading a fragment of a dispatch from some other reality.

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What’s more important: having a good system, or having good personnel? Broadly speaking, this distinction can be used across many fields of endeavor, whether it’s debating what makes a superior NFL team or evaluating how to run a company. It can be applied to the study of history—think Carlyle’s “Great Man” theory vs. Marxist interpretations where economic and sociological factors are primary causes. It’s a major division across academic disciplines, i.e. “the Humanities” as opposed to “the Sciences.”

All Tomorrows is a work of speculative science fiction that seems to lean heavily on a systematic analysis of life itself; that is, evolutionary biology. It is framed as the work of a future alien xeno-biologist recording the history of humanity as it evolved and journeyed into space. Like Gibbon standing among the ruins of ancient Rome, the narrator is reflecting on all the trials and challenges faced by the many species that originally came from Earth.

The initial “next steps” for humanity as described in this book include journeying to Mars, and of course, the inevitable Earth vs. Mars war that follows. From there, humans begin breeding to become better adapted to space travel, and over the millennia turn into a variety of strange creatures.

Speaking of strange creatures, they eventually encounter a species referred to as “the Qu”, beings with a God-complex who remake other lifeforms they encounter in experimental ways, leading to some true abominations. The Qu have seeded other worlds with lifeforms based on dinosaurs from Earth’s past, and once they meet “the Star People”, they are disgusted with this upstart species, and remake them into a variety of abominations as punishment.

Eventually, the Qu depart, and evolution continues to take its course, eventually leading to the rise of a machine-intelligence based empire with no regard for biological life. This empire also eventually experiences its downfall, and over hundreds of millions of years, new species of intelligent life arise to take their place.

As the timescale implies, the scope and span of this book is huge and sweeping. There are no “characters” as such, unless we consider whole species as characters. Many of the creatures described seem disturbing and abominable, although perhaps if given the chance, they would say the same about us. Evolution produces many strange things.

Although the book appears to be heavily steeped in systematic thinking, at the very end, the limits of such thinking are revealed. I won’t spoil it, but the title has a significance that becomes apparent only in the last line. This is where the comparison to Gibbon feels most apt; even when discussing the evolution of life on a massive scale, the author somehow never loses sight of the particular, of those little details that we categorize as “human.”

The book is illustrated by the author with images depicting all the different creatures described, which offers us a glimpse of how deeply unsettling and bizarre they are. H.R. Giger would be proud.

All in all, the book is a great way to stretch your imagination and think in cosmological scales. I’d even go so far as to say it’s inspiring, because all the vast cycles of rise and fall imply many untold stories within them. Highly recommended to fans of science-fiction.

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New Dawn is a military sci-fi thriller. The premise is that a dystopian Earth sent the titular colony ship to Mars, crewed by dissident and free-thinking scientists and explorers, who rebelled against the authoritarian Earth governments. The ship disappeared, and it was assumed that all the crew had been lost.

Many years later, New Dawn reappears in the sky above Earth, with a mysterious crew and sending ominous messages demanding Earth submit to their demands or face an invasion.

The Earth nations quickly scramble to fight back against this foe, including rounding up a team of their best engineers and scientists to go aboard. They are some of Earth’s most brilliant minds—and, as it happens, some of them have crossed paths before, and not in pleasant ways. This leads to tension between people like the brilliant engineer and his bitter ex-lover, as well as the young graduate student who would very much like to become his current lover.

There’s plenty of emotional turmoil among Earth’s military personnel as well. We have the daring Italian pilot who flies for NATO and the young Russian who fights alongside him. These two were probably my favorite characters in the book.

And then there’s the sinister NATO intelligence officer who oversees the whole operation. A classic manipulative bureaucrat, using blackmail and coercion to get others to play into his hands.

It’s an interesting concept, and the characters have potential. Unfortunately, a number of things didn’t work for me. The dialogue is quite stilted, and much of the prose seemed choppy and repetitive. Also, a number of key plot points were telegraphed early on.

Also, early on in the book, a traumatic event happens to one of the characters. It’s mentioned briefly, and then people carry on as if nothing happened. Then it comes up again much later in the story, as part of a plot twist (although this is one of those things that I could see coming), but then it’s dropped again, and it really shouldn’t be. Because it calls into question the whole modus operandi of what is being presented as a largely sympathetic faction, but it’s just hand-waved away in a couple pages. I wish could be more specific, but I don’t want to spoil it.

The book feels very much like the later Tom Clancy books: many of the plot beats are predictable because it’s quite clear who is supposed to win. Also, like Clancy, the book does get politically heavy-handed towards the end. I’m not against political messaging in books, and I try not to let whether or not I agree with an author’s views color my opinion of a book.

But what does color my opinion of a book is whether the political commentary is handled deftly or not. I mean, what is the point of putting your story in a futuristic sci-fi setting if you are just going to have exactly the same political dynamics as present-day Earth? To me, the advantage of a different setting is to be able to create allegories and analogues to political issues, to allow discussion of topics that otherwise would be too charged to raise.

In summary, I think New Dawn is an interesting concept, but the execution was so-so. But I will say this much: I kept reading it, because I wanted to know what would happen next. And to me, that’s the ultimate test of a story.

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The great philosopher-humorist Zachary Shatzer recently told me I might read “too many books about gritty, unshaven antiheroes who say things like ‘Sometimes a man has to do what must be done.'” And he may well be right. I’m descended from Irish policemen, many of whom probably played by their own rules and refused to do things by the book. So I’m a sucker for stories about tough cops who can’t stand being hamstrung by red tape. My epithet might well be the line Gallus says to Sejanus in an episode of I, Claudius:

A song sung by every small-town corrupt policeman, which is what you are and what you should have stayed!

Well, come to that, I think Sejanus got a bad rap.  He was just trying to get stuff done in the notoriously corrupt Roman Empire. But I digress.

This book is about just one such gritty cop: David Forbes Carter, a brilliant, daring and extremely anti-bureaucracy Interplanetary Police Force agent. Since the mysterious death of his sister, Carter has become an increasingly loose cannon, and so the IPF assigns profiler Veronique de Tournay to try and get a sense of his unstable psychology and determine if he is still fit to serve.

It’s the classic set-up: two cops forced to work together, neither of whom likes the other. It’s been done a thousand times. But, as George Lucas once said, “they’re clichés because they work!” He ought to know. Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark are nothing but clichés, and they became some of the most beloved films in history.

So it is with Phoenix. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and that’s exactly what made it so much fun; like seeing an old friend again after a few years. It doesn’t hurt that Janeski and I seem to have more or less the same vision for what a future solar system-spanning civilization would look like. Space stations, corrupt mega-corporations, cultists, conspiracies, etc. I had a very easy time picturing this world.

And of course, those cultists and conspiracies and mega-corporations soon get in the way of Agent de Tournay’s efforts at profiling Agent Carter, and the pair is caught up in trying to solve a massive plot to destroy the entire interplanetary government. As often as not, they resort to Carter’s decidedly non-standard methods of operating, though with time, Agent de Tournay helps him understand that waving a gun in people’s faces isn’t always the best answer to a problem.

Like I said, if you’re expecting something groundbreaking, you won’t find it here. But if you’re expecting a fun adventure story in a great sci-fi setting, this is just the ticket. And it would make a great movie!

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They say not to judge a book by its cover. Well, you certainly shouldn’t let your judgment of the cover be your final judgment. Your assessment of a book should be based on a whole host of factors. Still, a cover is the first thing you see, and it makes a difference as to whether  you read the book or not.

I picked up this book because I saw the cover on Twitter, and it looked interesting. Simultaneously pulpy and punky isn’t a combination you often see.

As it turns out, it has only a tangential connection to the book itself, and I’m still not sure exactly who the characters depicted are supposed to be. There is a woman who wears gear not unlike that seen here, but she is described repeatedly as being dark-skinned. Also, this scene looks sort of urban or industrial, and most of the fighting takes place in open terrain.

The book is about a rebel insurgency trying to overthrow the monarchical government of the planet Sparta. In response, the Spartan kings hire a mercenary unit, Falkenberg’s legion, to assist them in putting down the rebellion.

I admit that the details of “who” and “where” and “why” were all rather unclear to me during the first quarter of the story or so. But this is not the first book in this series. Depending who you ask, it’s either the 2nd, 3rd, or 5th book in a series. But someone on Twitter claimed it could be read as a standalone, and if you can’t trust strangers on Twitter, well, who can you trust?

And in the end, they were kind of right, because after a while enough details became apparent that I could sort of follow who the characters were. Skida Thibodeau is the woman leading the rebellion, Prince Lysander is the acting ruler of Sparta, and Falkenberg is a mercenary leader. There were a bunch of other characters too, including a former prostitute turned mercenary and a corrupt Spartan senator. It wasn’t all clear, but the main players were vivid enough that I was interested in what they were doing. And I appreciated the multiple shout-outs to T.E. Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The cyberpunk cover notwithstanding, this book is military sci-fi through and through. It’s actually more military than sci-fi, with legions (ha!) of analogies by the characters drawn from the history of Earth warfare. The final battle sequence feels like accounts of present-day warfare, in that it’s basically all frantic radio chatter among commanders of various units.

More than anything sci-fi, this book reminded me of a Tom Clancy novel. Actually, it’s better than most of the Clancy books that I’ve read, in that the characters felt real, as opposed to cardboard cut-outs. But the basic Clancian elements are there: the clean-cut elite anti-terror unit vs. the terrorists and their slimy politician supporters form the fundamental conflict of the story.

And of course, the plot is a thinly-veiled fictionalization that allows the author(s) to expound on real-world political issues. Pournelle, at least, seems to have had approximately the same political alignment as the aforementioned Clancy, and his Cold Warrior mentality comes through here, as the entire plot has strong echoes of many a U.S./Soviet proxy war.

All told, it was pretty good. Probably even better if you read it in sequence. But then again, there’s something to be said for just being dropped in media res. After all, the oldest work of military fiction still in existence starts out that way!

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Before we begin, I want to point out that this book, which is a science-fiction romance/adventure story, was published in 2014, a full five years before the Star Wars movie that started with the line “The dead speak!” In case you wanted further evidence that the indie book scene has fresher ideas than multi-billion dollar entertainment franchises.

But, as anyone who has read Lorinda Taylor’s The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars series may be anticipating, this is far more Trek than Wars. It has a federation of intelligent life forms, all of whom work together in a peaceful spirit of friendly collaboration. At the center of the search for intelligent life is Asc. Kaitrin Oliva, a skilled linguistic anthropologist, or should I say, xeno-linguist.

When another exploration team brings back a huge, mortally wounded termite, Asc. Oliva attempts to communicate with it, and records the sounds it makes before it dies. From this, she is eventually able to work out the basics of the termite language, and so a return expedition is soon planned, led by the handsome but enigmatic Prof. Griffen Gwidian.

Prof. Gwidian has a good deal of the Byronic hero about him; cultured and aristocratic, moody and secretive about his past, he and Kaitrin embark upon a tumultuous relationship, to which much the expedition preparation is a backdrop. Interwoven with the romance of the human characters is a palace intrigue drama among the alien termites. These sections are handled almost like a play, complete with stage directions. I liked these parts best of all.

The book features plenty of world-building, including a detailed history of how Earth got to be in the shape it’s in by the 30th century. It’s an optimistic take, again very much in the vein of Roddenberry’s hopeful vision of the future. Of course, even in Taylor’s history of the intervening hundreds of years, humanity has to go through a few rough patches.

But the bulk of the story centers on Gwidian and Oliva’s stormy romance, and in that regard it feels like a more old-fashioned book. Almost like something a Brontë might have written. In the context of the high-tech, spacefaring setting, it was nice to have something so familiar to keep things grounded.

In short, lovers of both sci-fi and romance will find something to enjoy in this book. Taylor’s obvious appreciation for language helps bring both the human and non-human characters together. The only caveat is that, like The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars, this book ends on a cliffhanger that makes reading the next book in the series an absolute must to see how things play out. So, if you read this one, know that you’ll be wanting to pick up the second one as soon as you finish.