***This review has also been posted on The Social Potato

When I read the blurb for this book, I knew I would love it. It sounded like such a Rashika book and I could already imagine how much fun I would have with the book.

We are thrown right into the action so it was, at first, quite hard for me to keep up. I was confused about what was happening and as I progressed, the initial confusion made it so that I would have to flip back to the beginning to understand what was happening. So yes, that did become a problem for me (to the point where I wasn’t sure of a character’s approximate age until the end of the book, and I was off by a LOT) but, once you get into this book, it will suck you in and have you flipping pages and looking at the clock, hoping that you still have plenty of time left to read.

The identity of the Rook surprised me a little (you find out early on but the only reason I won’t mention it is because it’s fun to find out for yourself) but I am glad the author chose that character to be the Rook because they are so strong and clever and just so fantastically themselves.

Sophia is a great main character. She is badass in the actual sense of the word. There are so many things she pulls that made me want to high five her. She is the kind of character I love in spite of her faults. Never once did I want to shake her, even if she did something I wasn’t completely okay with me because I was a 100% on her side.

Rene was a beautiful creature and I beg that you keep your slimy little paws off of MY RENE (yes I just laid my claim to a fictional character in my review for the book). He is just so fantastic and I imagine that had this been an adult book rather than a YA, there would be cold showers involved. He is a swoon worthy character AND I LOVE HIM. He is more than just a love interest. He is a fishy little creature who is clever and won’t fail to charm your pants off.

Their relationship is also a thing of beauty. They get off to a rough start and once the sparks start flying, the lack of relationship drama is actually surprising. There are so many ways the author could have made their relationship a hot and cold thing yet it was never that. It was  just pure gorgeous development with one major bump. They trust each other, she confides in him and she actually, for the most part, doesn’t have secrets from him. ISN’T THAT BEAUTIFUL?

This book also had a very enjoyable plot line even if I wanted more in terms of action. It isn’t that there isn’t much going on -- the stakes were pretty damn high – but I just wanted a little more in terms of what they were doing and how they were doing it, and just some more of ass-kicking ya know?

I also found the plot to be pretty believable considering that the Rook isn’t actually old. The Rook doesn’t do all the things on their own, the Rook actually has a group of people they trust to help them and I also really liked the way things worked out. With the people taking charge of their situation instead of the Rook. The Rook, while having seen their suffering and the pain, cannot possibly take leadership for something like that since they haven’t had to put up with it and I really liked that.

I also really liked the secondary characters! My favorite being Tom, followed by Benoit. I love that none of these secondary characters are just there, they actually play a part, and they have stories that we get to know. They have miniature arcs and along the way, we get to learn more and more about them which just made me love them all the more.

I was a little disappointed by the world building. This book is set in such a gorgeous location and I wanted to see that explored a little more. This book is also set in a post-apocalyptic world but we only get minimal information on that, just enough for us to understand the world some and while I was upset we didn’t get more, it was also understandable since there are other things going on in this story for everything to be fit into one standalone novel.

This was such a spectacular read and I loved almost every minute of it.  It does take a while to get into but once I adjusted to the situation, I devoured the book and had lots of fun. It is definitely a read I’d recommend to all you readers who is looking something adventurous set in the future.

Brainycat's 5 "B"s:
blood: 4
boobs: 5
bombs: 2
bondage: 1
blasphemy: 2
Stars: 3
Bechdel Test: PASS
Deggan's Rule: FAIL
Gay Bechdel Test: PASS

Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.

This book started off with a scene of explicit depravity that would make Ed Lee proud, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was hooked right away and that's what carried me through the rest of the book. After that, it became a romance complete with InstaLove and some steamy lesbian sex between the Older Wiser Stronger Emotionally-Unavailable longtime lesbian MC and the Younger Enthusiastic Softer Idealistic Never-Been-With-A-Woman-Before co-MC. It's a bog-standard romance, dressed up in an implausible zombie scenario - in fact, all of the worldbuilding was one big "WTF?!?!". The romance - well, if you're at all familiar with the genre there will be absolutely no surprises here for you. The last two thirds of the book featured predictable plot and character development punctuated a few times by sex. I kept hoping for more of the horrific depravity the book started off with but it never happened again. In a sense, it feels like a bit of false advertising, but OTOH I've met my annual quota for romance.

Brainycat's 5 "B"s:
blood: 3
boobs: 1
bombs: 3
bondage: 4
blasphemy: 4
Stars: 5
Bechdel Test: PASS
Deggan's Rule: PASS
Gay Bechdel Test: FAIL

Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.

This is a big book. I don't use the "count pages" plugin in Calibre, but AZN says it's 400 kindle pages. Some of these shorts would qualify as novellas on their own. It took me a long time to get through it (short bursts before I fell asleep at night) but it was totally worth the effort. I actually finished each story in this anthology which is a rarity for me - most collections have at least one dud that I give up on. I wasn't familiar with the editor Jonathan Strahan before I bought this; Peter Watts and Charles Stross sold the book to me. I still haven't read any of Jonathan's books, but I've become a big fan of his ability to put a collection of stories together and I've already bought the next two anthologies in the Infinity Project series. I finished the book a few days ago but I wanted some time to digest the book before I wrote some gushingly fanboyish review.

The styles of these stories run the gamut from "free form speculative fiction" all the way to "old school hard science fiction". There's a couple of "creature feature" stories in here, but it's not about the critters as much as it is about how humans can adapt and change. Engineering has been described as "the application of science", and to that end all of these stories examine the dialectic relationship of human(ish) peoples to adapt to the reality of the world around them, and in turn adapt the reality to peoples' needs. All of the stories are thoughtful, well written and each of the authors is now on my "their name will help sell books to me" list. This is an example of what I expect from an anthology - I want to be challenged, I want to have my horizons expanded, and I want a series of knockout punches that together add up to a whole greater than the parts. This book delivers on all counts.

'Malak' by Peter Watts
    - A semiautonomous drone is programmed to assess the value of collateral damage before striking, and while optimizing it's algorithms to determine the easiest way to avoid politically costly civilian deaths it comes to some unexpected conclusions. I'm a HUGE fan of Peter Watts, and this story does not disappoint. Another knockout example of how dark, cynical and dystopic near futures needn't be cut from the same cloth as Neuromancer to be chillingly effective. Also, Peter did a spectacular job of writing from the POV of the drone without sounding like PacMan or Robocop, which is no small feat.

'Watching the Music Dance' by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
    - Over the last few years, major software sellers have been moving away from the boxed model - where you buy an unlimited license for a version - and replaced it with a subscription model, where you pay a much smaller fee every month and get a limited time license but all upgrades are included. This has caused no small amount of consternation among sizable number of consumers who want to own their tools outright. Software running on a computer is one thing, but what about software we install into our brains? To whom do we want to be beholden to with regards to neurological enhancements: The companies making products? Parents trying to give their young children every possible chance to succeed? This is a poignant story that addresses these questions and leaves the reader with a number of questions to ponder rather than a tidy conclusion.
    
'Laika's Ghost' by Karl Schroeder
    - Not the strongest story in the bunch, but that's a reflection of the overall quality of the collection rather than any real weakness in this story. What starts off as a straightforward cyberpunky conspiracy story a'la "young hacker finds out too much, has to go into hiding from Big Corporation" turns into a byzantine world where the conspiracy is much bigger and a lot older than Big Corporation, and has implications for everyone on the planet. Well written and very atmospheric, this story falls short of the others because I felt like it didn't really sink it's teeth into some of the questions it raises.

'The Invasion of Venus' by Stephen Baxter
    - Every so often, while reading SciFi, I run across a story that verbalizes so much more eloquently than I could my ideas about how Some Big Event would play out in reality. The Big Event in this case is "discovering alien intelligences", and the way it plays out is "They're not even a little bit interested in a bunch of primates flinging poo at each other on some watery ball of mud". The story plays out as an extended allegorical conversation between a scientist and a woo-woo vaguely theistic character who are trying to come to grips with the knowledge that humanity is only the center of it's own world, and is inconsequential on the interstellar scale.

'The Server and the Dragon' by Hannu Rajaniemi
    - A long, long time after the singularity and in a star system far, far away the fruits of technology are far from safe. What is the relationship between predator and prey in the interstellar scale? This is another of the (relatively) weaker stories in the collection; I felt it took a long time to get to where it's going, but one could make an argument that that helps to show the monumental scale of how these sorts of things play out.

'Bit Rot' by Charles Stross
    - I have no doubt posterity will remember this as the seminal Post-Human zombie story. In Charles's entirely capable hands, the story stays entirely clear of the obvious horror tropes and stays firmly in the scifi camp, even though it's basically a zombie story played out on an interstellar ship manned by post-humans many generations removed from their biologically bound progenitors. An excellent read, and a fantastic demonstration of how no matter how capable and how carefully you plan, something can always go catastrophically wrong.

'Creatures with Wings' by Kathleen Ann Goonan
    - This story could've been a disaster, but careful writing saved it. It veered dangerously close to reading like one of those intensely allegorical inward journey of self discovery, but deftly avoided feeling like I was witnessing the author mentally masturbating while gazing deeply into her navel. That's a fine line to walk along a slippery slope, and major kudos to the author for staying on the straight and narrow. While I'm not even a little bit religious in the slightest, I do have a soft spot for the Buddhists and this story is driven by Buddhist principles and ideals. The first of two stories that try to provide a scifi retelling of classic religious tales, I think this one works much better than the other and it's certainly left a more lasting impression on me.

'Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone' by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar
    - A very well written story that tries to work out how time travelling paradoxes could be self-healing. Not much going in the way of characterization or setting, but the plot moves along well and it was very well written. The quality of the writing, in that it stays out of the way and paints details only where they're needed, is what made this otherwise pedestrian story maintain the caliber of the rest of the collection.

'Mantis' by Robert Reed
    - The most unashamedly postmodern of the stories, this plays on the idea that every window works both ways and then tries to push the analogy into the quantum realms by having the viewers effect the viewed - eg, everyone somehow effects each other even though they can only observe each other but not communicate. Not the strongest story in the book, but it's a notch or two above the likes of "Laika's Ghost" or "Mercies".

Judgement Eve, John C. Wright
    - The second SciFi retelling of a religious parable, this time the subject is the ejection of mankind from the Garden of Eden from the Abrahamaic traditions. The characters and the world they inhabit felt to me like a pale rehash of Walter Jon Williams' "Aristoi", though to be fair only a wee part of creation and a tiny cast of characters is important to this story so maybe the sample is skewed. I didn't feel particularly impressed by this rendition of what the fall could be like in a post-humanist, nano-machine enabled world and I found myself skimming hoping something unexpected would happen. I got to the end of story with no surprises. "Mantis" is the better religious parable in this collection.

A Soldier of the City, David Moles
    - A lost soldier, hopelessly cut off from the unit to which he owes fanatical allegiance, wins the hearts and minds of a distant and backwards people while in turn learning to be more empathic and understanding of other cultures. Not unlike the movie Soldier, actually. Except different - much more talking and a lot less action. I liked the world building, and any story where gods walk among mortals - and themselves can be killed by megatonnage weoponry - has my interest right away.

Mercies, Gregory Benford
    - Oh my. In Formula One racing right now, there's a debate going on about the cost of competing in the sport. The school of thought I subscribe to believes that the backmarker teams - less well funded, and who will never win races let alone championships - are a vital part of the sport because they make sure the big name teams never come in last and their sponsors never have to face the indignity of being on a car at the bottom of the results listing. I feel like this story does the same job for this book. There just wasn't anything new or interesting in the plot, the writing was average with some big plot holes and stiff dialogue, the premise was shaky at best, the setting was perpetually unpolished and I never found myself caring what happened to the protagonist. Other than all that, though, it was a good story.

The Ki-anna, Gwyneth Jones
    - This story has all the characterization and world building that's lacking in Mercies, with an interesting noirish detective thriller thrown in for good measure. It was a very enjoyable little "trek" story - ostensibly, it's about getting the protagonist from an orbiting station down to the surface of the planet and into a temple, but slowly and delightfully the plot thickens until all the players are trying to get somewhere physically and emotionally. An interesting story with some direct references to contemporary race and class struggles that works on a variety of levels, and has definitely put Gwyneth Jones on my watch list.

The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees, John Barnes
    - Probably the most relatable story to our contemporary world, it's placed in the near future where the first post-humans are still regarded as anomolous superstars. After using exophysics to try to tame rampant climate change, humans come to understand that for as much as we believe the anthropocene era is the most cataclysmic chapter in earth's history, the fact is we're still just a bunch of baby faced primates who just got here a few years ago - and our idea of "status quo" is hopelessly faulted by our tiny little sample size.

Brainycat's 5 "B"s:
blood: 5
boobs: 2
bombs: 2
bondage: 5
blasphemy: 5
Stars: 3
Bechdel Test: FAIL
Deggan's Rule: PASS (in spirit if not the letter)
Gay Bechdel Test: FAIL

Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.

Natural Born Killers is one of my favorite movies. This story covers exactly the same emotional territory though not as deeply and doesn't make any greater comments about society's use of media for it's vicarious bloodsports. I also felt a strong resemblance to Kutter, but AM&NL is a much better read. This just a cute little love story about two special people fated to meet each other, fall in love, and end their lives together in a blaze of glory. It's written at what I'd consider a YA level of vocabulary and complexity, but I suppose it's probably inappropriate for younger readers (I'm not a very good judge of these things).  It's not a long story - it only took me a couple of short sittings to read it. As romance goes, this is the sort of romance I like, it's twisted, dark and gory. No explicit sex though, and that's a drawback that's worth at least a star. I was also hoping for more gore since killing is what brings these two people together, and I think opportunities to show them growing together were skipped over in a few scenes. It felt like a bit of fearfulness on the author's behalf, like she pulled back a little from truly committing herself to following the characters where they wanted to go.

It's hard to write an in-depth review of a short novella. Especially this one, as it's really all about atmosphere and mood rather than plot and character. We know the characters before the story starts, we know their arcs, and the setting really doesn't matter. To make a musical analogy, Natural Born Killers is like Psyclon 9's Parasitic and Atomic Montessa and Nuclear LuLu is like Mr. Kitty's Time. AM&NL is a good story and I see why it won the awards it has. I like what it does and where it goes, but I just wish it were more explicit. Readers with more delicate sensibilities will probably like it more than I did.

I've felt like I've been in a bit of a reading rut lately. It feels like I've been unimpressed by most of the books I've read lately, but I've been getting my recommendations from the same sources and following the same due-diligence procedures as I have in the past. I refuse to believe books are getting worse - while there are many more shitty books being produced then in years past, there are also more good books being produced recently as well. Therefore the most likely culprit for my malaise is myself. Have my tastes changed without my realization? Has my tolerance for anything less than completely amazing shrunk? Am I just generally grumpy and upset and taking it out on my readings?

When the going gets tough, the tough reassess their datum. So I reread Neuromancer for the umpteenth time last week. I don't even know how many times I've read it - at least three dozen times is a rational guess. I read it the first time as a wee lad when it first came out and it completely blew me away. This was back in the days when email addresses used exclamation points instead of ampersands, a megabyte was an unfathomably huge chunk of storage, and the nascent internet held all the promise of a bright and glorious future of an interconnected humanity sharing their science, hopes and dreams. We've come to an interconnected first world sharing pictures of cats, so I guess the dream isn't totally destroyed yet - but I digress.

Neuromancer has spoken to me throughout my life: as a troubled teen, an aimless young adult, an alcoholic adult and a sober middle aged person different parts of the book have syncopated with my thoughts and feelings and not provided answers as much as provided a language for mapping my internal spaces. The way the setting unfolds from every character's position like a tesseract designed by a technofetishist doing rails of coke the size of Sharpies, how every character is filled with loneliness and wrapped in fear but is searching for a way to accommodate their need for companionship resonates with me in a way I can't describe without sounding like a ridiculous fanboy. Which I am, to be honest, but I'll spare us all the details.

So, yeah, I reread my all time most favorite book to see if I'd changed unbeknownst to myself. It turns out I haven't. If anything I appreciate it more as I grow older. I don't look up to Case and Molly like I used to; I don't want to be them or imagine myself living their life (ok, maybe a little...) but instead I think I can appreciate them more as characters that live their own lives separate from me. Even as my relationship with Case, Molly, Finn, Dixie, Wintermute and Rio evolve the world they live in is familiar and comfortable as a well worn blanket, a safe haven of lawless bright lights and technomagic.