Doughnut by Tom Holt

Rating: 3/5, average

My brother’s been bugging me to read this for a long time and I haven’t been too interested, but he came and visited and started reading it at my house so I thought “what the hell” and picked it up after he left.

The front cover looks tasty but doesn’t tell much about the contents of the book.

The back cover reads:

“The doughnut is a thing of beauty.

A circle of fried doughy perfection.

A source of comfort in trying times, perhaps.

For Theo Bernstein, however, it is far, far more.

Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he’s unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn’t have any money.

Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.

By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions. A journey that will rewrite the laws of physics. A battle to save humanity itself.

This is the tale of a man who had nothing and gave it all up to find his destiny — and a doughnut.”

The plot is pretty convoluted. We join Theo, a disgraced scientist, as he’s trying to recover the shambles of his life after a miscalculation he makes causes a giant explosion. His most recent ex-wife Amanda (he had three previous wives, Amanda was his fourth) left him, we’re told because people were whispering about her “there goes the woman whose husband blew up the VVLHC.”

I suppose she couldn’t handle that… he also implies that she’s greedy because she received a large amount of assets in the divorce but was still mad she didn’t get more. This seemed a bit misogynistic to me because I can’t imagine a woman leaving a man she truly loved because he’s suddenly infamous. Especially if what he did was a mistake… well, maybe if it killed people. But it sounds like it didn’t, because he says the scientists he worked with were mad at him because they were out of work, which means they’re alive, so it sounds like no one died.

Theo has a lot of toxic relationships, but he has no sense of introspection about his role in them. The people around him are all terrible to the point where it strains belief. He doesn’t seem to have any self-reflection, only self-pity. I did start to actually pity him about halfway through the book as I learned what the other characters did to him, which made it a bit more tolerable for me because I could see where he was coming from, but I still couldn’t quite believe that one semi-decent person could be surrounded by nothing but selfish people.

The negative depiction of his ex-wives as greedy, status-conscious, and fickle and the wallowing in self-pity got me off on the wrong foot with this book, but I started to get more interested as the plot started picking up around page 50. Unfortunately, I can’t really go into detail because it’s all spoilers, but it’s mostly about hopping between custom multiverses while searching for lost relatives.

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Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Rating: 4/5, good

I first read this book when I was seventeen, as part of summer reading before senior year of high school. It’s a short book, but very dense and philosophical. It was a bit hard to read and I remember not quite getting it, but the idea that religion is human-constructed and shouldn’t be taken too seriously buried itself deep inside my brain like a wasp burrowing into an oak gall.

I recently reread it with my local science fiction book club and I understood and enjoyed it more on the second reading. I remembered most of the characters, the general outline of the plot and major scenes, and the fictional humanistic religion of Bokononism.

Cat’s Cradle is about a writer who is researching a book about what important people were doing the moment the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His research sets off a series of events that lead to him becoming the president of a small island in the Caribbean and the destruction of the world.

John, the writer, sends a letter to Newt, the youngest son of Dr. Hoenikker, the scientist who designed the bomb, asking him what Dr. Hoenikker was doing the moment of the atomic explosion. Newt sends back a reply describing how that morning his father was showing him cat’s cradle (a children’s game that’s played by making a series of shapes with a loop of string between one’s fingers). Newt, who had grown accustomed to being ignored by his neglectful father (and the children had no mother because she died giving birth to Newt because of an accident Dr. Hoenikker caused that damaged her pelvis), was frightened by the sudden attention and ran away into the backyard.

In the backyard, he finds the middle brother, Frank, shaking bugs in a jar to make them fight. Angela, the oldest sister, asks Newt what happened between him and his father. Newt whines about how much he hates his father, and Angela slaps him and tells him that their father just won the war. Then Frank punches Angela in the stomach (defending Newt? Or just joining in the violence?) and she rolls around on the ground in pain with Newt as Frank stands over them both laughing. Their father sticks his head out the window for a moment and then returns to whatever he was doing without a word.

I think this scene does a fantastic job of capturing the trauma of growing up with an emotionally unavailable father. Dr. Hoenikker reminds me a bit of my dad. I really related to Newt being frightened by sudden intense attention from his father after being ignored for a long time. My father was a little bit less detached than Dr. Hoenikker—he would have come down and yelled at us, then gone back to whatever he was doing—but I find Vonnegut’s portrayal of a distant father in a demanding career to be spot on. Vonnegut’s own father was an architect who Vonnegut described as a “dreamy artist”, so he might have had a similar experience growing up.

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Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Rating: 4/5, good

Eversion is the mathematical problem of turning a sphere inside out without breaking it. In the 2022 book Eversion, the crew of a ship finds a mysterious structure that appears to be in the middle of that process of turning inside out. The protagonist Silas Coade, the ship’s doctor, is trapped in a Groundhog’s Day cycle of repeatedly dying and reawakening into a similar scenario a century or so later until he figures out important truths about the building, the crew, and himself.

The characters really turned me off at first, but they grew on me over time. I almost put this book down after the Russian financier of the expedition (Topolsky) said some very racist things about the Mexican explosives expert (Ramos). It reminded me of some of the more iffy parts of The Sparrow where the narration discusses the main character’s Spanish and indigenous heritage almost as a symbol of colonization or the West mixing with the exotified other rather than a mundane fact of life.

It made me wonder, “Why is scifi being weird about mestizos again? It’s strange enough that it happened once!” What furthered this impression was that Silas dismisses it weakly, only telling Topolsky not to breathe on his patient (what makes it worse is that Ramos was unconscious and undergoing cranial surgery at the time). In retrospect it makes sense because Silas didn’t want to anger his employer and his character is not the type to speak up, but since this happens so close to the beginning of the novel I wasn’t sure if Silas (or the author) shared Topolsky’s opinions about Ramos.

I wasn’t sure if I should keep reading or not, so I read reviews and watched a video by Raf Blutaxt raving about it and saying that there was a twist that plays on the main character’s sexism later in the novel, so I decided to give it a chance to see if it would get more woke. I wouldn’t really say it’s woke (the twist mentioned is a fairly minor point because the character in question is mostly out of the narrative by then) but all the characters do get a lot more sympathetic except for Topolsky, who becomes a clear villain.

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Diaspora by Greg Egan

Rating: 4/5, good

I picked this up because I heard Greg Egan uses nonbinary ve/ver/vis pronouns for his characters in it. I was looking at pronoun lists, trying to figure out which I liked best for myself, and was really attracted to the sound of ve/ver/vis… it sounds very shiny and futuristic and I dig it. I like the way the pronoun set has neutral, feminine, and masculine sounds all together and the familiar English pronoun endings.

Important Note: ve/ver/vis pronouns were actually first used by Keri Hulme in her novel, The Bone People (which looks very depressing, though I do plan on reading it).

I have to say that although I really enjoyed seeing my favorite neoproun set used, I didn’t get a lot else out of Diaspora. It’s very hard scifi to the point where it almost feels like a different genre from the classic scifi I’m used to (like H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury). It’s very heavy on the math and physics and I have to admit most of it went right over my head. If you like math and physics and have a good background in it, though, you might love it (I know at least two physicists who did!).

The story follows Yatima, a newly-minted “orphan” AI who lives in a city (or server) full of other AI. There’s a long, involved description of how the computer creates new AI and then a funny scene of how Yatima develops vis personality by interacting with older AI, much like a human baby. I was able to imagine Yatima as not being gendered, but the other characters had names and personalities that seemed more gendered to me – Blanca, Gabriel, and Inoshiro seemed feminine, masculine, and masculine and I imagined them in my head as those genders.

Actually, Yatima is a feminine name in Africa… it does seem like the characters were written to have gender, but not sex, and that’s what the nonbinary pronouns are referring to (because they’re computers and don’t have physical sex characteristics). In that way, it’s not quite as progressive as I was hoping it would be.

After Yatima meets vis new friends, they watch the AI fend off an asteroid from hitting Earth together…

Then the humans are all destroyed in a gamma ray burst, after which the AI are put on physical computers and propelled into space, where they encounter one race of aliens that live in five dimensions and another that live in sixteen. To say the least, things get weird and very technical. There are some philosophical ideas brought up, like how having multiple versions of oneself saved at different times might affect one psychologically, but it’s very hard to follow without understanding what’s going on on a technical level, and I just did not have the patience or science background to untangle it.

I did like the idea of living in a computer—not having to feel pain or any other physical sensation without consent. If I could do it, I absolutely would, no question. I can live without physical pleasure, but I would LOVE to live without physical pain. Plus near-infinite mental speed and capacity is the cherry on top!* Diaspora is very optimistic in this way. Even though the fleshers die, humanity survives on in computers, living until they complete their self-realization and end their sequence.

If you could live in a computer, would you do it?

*- This is assuming Cartesian Dualism is real and the mind can be separated from the body. If thoughts and emotions are actually physical sensations I’m not sure what living without a physical body would be like. It might not resemble intelligent life as we know it…

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Rating: 3/5, average

TW: sexual assault

If this book wasn’t chosen for book club, I would have never picked it up. I’m Jewish and not terribly religious, so when I hear a book is about Catholic priests, I’m immediately turned off. I got in the habit of tuning out Christian stuff by skipping out on Christmas plays in elementary school. On the other hand, this is a first contact story with religious themes, so I was kind of intrigued…

The Sparrow is about a Jesuit mission to an alien planet called Rakhat. The main characters are Emilio, a Cuban Jesuit priest, Jimmy, a physicist at SETI, Anne, a friend and pupil of Emilio’s, and Sofia, a Sephardic Jewish computer scientist. We’re told right from the beginning that horrible, scarring things happened to Emilio and everybody else died. The narrative is woven between the thread of Emilio’s recovery post-mission and the thread of time leading up to and including the mission.

I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to read this and I saw an interview where the author implied the book was an apologia for Christopher Columbus:

“The idea came to me in the summer of 1992 as we were celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. There was a great deal of historical revisionism going on as we examined the mistakes made by Europeans when they first encountered foreign cultures in the Americas and elsewhere. It seemed unfair to me for people living at the end of the twentieth century to hold those explorers and missionaries to standards of sophistication and tolerance that we hardly manage even today.”

I felt like this had a really strong political background, but I had a hard time figuring out what exactly it was. The reason I kept reading The Sparrow was that I was interested in trying to piece together her political and religious ideology. Mary Doria Russell was brought up as a Catholic but left the Church when was she was fifteen and converted to Judaism later in life. She doesn’t really fit in the conservative or liberal boxes. She seems generally pro-colonist, but recognizes the harm that can come from reckless colonization. She seems to lean neo-liberal, and she uses a lot of racial stereotypes in her writing, though not in an intentionally negative way. I think she’s trying to be descriptive rather than racist but a lot of her generalizations fall into a gray area between racist and not racist.  

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Lightning Strike by Catherine Asaro

Rating: 3/5, average

This one I read with the local book club. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, and I might have even skipped it if I didn’t know it was by a woman writer with a PhD in Chemical Physics. The cover on Amazon looks really cheesy, but the writing isn’t too bad.

Lightning Strike is about a girl with Mayan ancestry who meets an alien late at night on the way back from her shift at the bar. They strike up a quick, passionate, and playful romance. Their dynamic reminded me a little bit of Inuyasha. Althor is a little hot-headed, simple, and very protective of Tina. He’s not a bad imaginary boyfriend—he’d probably appeal to Twilight fans as well, since he has that quality of knowing where the heroine is and if she’s in trouble at all times.

Tina is struggling hard when she meets Althor, trying to save up enough money to go to school and study physics. Her father left their family when she was young, and she was raised by her mother and her older brother. Her older brother was killed in a gang conflict, so now she’s mostly on her own. She’s still getting harassed by the man who killed her brother, and Althor defends her from him, which is how he earns her trust. This story takes on some heavy themes for a light scifi/romance, with themes of sexual assault, single-mother families, gang strife, and racial inequality.

This book was originally published in 1997 and it does come off a little dated in its slang and cultural references. This first installment in the Skolian Saga is a lot of background for the series to come. There’s a little plot, but it’s mostly introducing the characters, setting up relationships, and worldbuilding.

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Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

Rating: 2/5, bad

WARNING: ALL OF THE SPOILERS!!!

I love Lindsay Ellis’s channel and was super hyped for this book but I thought it was extremely boring, if intricately conceived.

Here’s a basic summary:

Axiom’s End is about a 21-year-old woman named Cora who is aimlessly drifting through life working temp jobs. Her dad, Nils, is a Julian Assange-like whistleblower who leaked a memo about the existence of aliens in government custody. She lives with her mom and two younger siblings, who she helps take care of after her father fled the country. Through a series of events, Cora meets an alien named Ampersand and they grew close and defend Earth from Obelus, a group of hostile aliens.

I had a hard time getting a read on Cora because she’s not a very active protagonist. Things generally happen to her and she reacts to them with fear, acceptance, or anger. She definitely takes more action in the second half, but it takes a long time to get there. I did imagine Cora as looking like Lindsay Ellis, which is a danger of publishing a fiction book as an already famous person. It’s written in third person, but I think if Lindsay Ellis had used first person it might have helped readers connect with Cora better.

I’ve been watching Lindsay Ellis since her Nostalgia Chick days. My favorite is her RENT rant, “Look Pretty and Do as Little as Possible”, which discusses Rent and how it relates to the AIDS epidemic. Her videos are sardonic, thoughtful, and funny. She’s great at pointing out things that are silly, repetitive, or ideologically-driven in media that usually fly under viewers’ radar. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much of her personality come through in this book. There were a couple glimmers of her type of humor here and there, but overall Axiom’s End plays things pretty straight, which made it kind of boring. A lot of the jokes that would be funny on video with voice inflection come across flat in print.

The main issue I had with this book is that it’s about 65% info-dumping with the occasional romance or action scene telling the reader about all the different types of aliens and governmental bodies. It can be a little hard to follow and pay attention. I found myself getting bored almost every page and had to really push through it.

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Chthon by Piers Anthony

Rating: 3/5, average

TW: rape

This book is either brilliant or stupid and I’m not sure which one… possibly both.

I saw this as #1 on a list of Weirdest Science Fiction some years ago and tried to read it, but only got about 30% in because there’s a pretty brutal rape scene that seemed to come out of nowhere and I didn’t know what was happening in the story. I decided to pick it up again after reading sections of Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. She discusses the idea of the chthonic (associated with the feminine, earthy, sexual, consumptive) and I thought it might make more sense to me now then it did back then. It did… kind of.

Chthon is about a young man named Aton who is sent to a prison (called Chthon) for a crime that is not revealed until the half-way point. A mysterious woman called Malice, a minionette (a kind of wood nymph), kissed Aton when he was a child, and now he’s obsessed with finding her. But Malice has a secret that isn’t revealed until the climax…

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The Murderbot Diaries vol. 1: All Systems Red

allsystemsredAll Systems Red by Martha Wells

Rating: 3/5, average

 

I really loved the concept of this, but I wasn’t crazy about the execution.

All Systems Red is about a nonbinary asexual robot who went berserk in their last job and killed a bunch of their employers, so in their head they call themselves “murderbot” (thus the name of the series, The Murderbot Diaries). They’ve been refurbished by the company and set out on another assignment, this time as a security bot for a team of scientists who are scouting a planet to see if it has enough resources to be worth buying stock in.

Murderbot goes on a data-gathering run with two of the scientists, but they get attacked by some of the local fauna. There wasn’t anything in the reports they got about the insectoid hostile, so they go back through the paperwork and find out that certain things are missing and the reports appear to have been sabotaged or hacked. The rest of the book is them trying to find out why there is missing information in the documents and missing parts of their map. Continue reading “The Murderbot Diaries vol. 1: All Systems Red”

Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon

venusplusx

Rating: 3/5, average

Warning: This review contains spoilers! It really ended up being more of a summary than a review because I was having a hard time understanding the plot and I thought others might benefit from seeing the story written out. It’s well-written but there’s a lot of complexity in the language as well as the ideas and I think it’s more enjoyable if you understand it holistically as you read.

The first time I read it the 1950s language in the Herb and Smith sections was really confusing to me, but all you need to know is that they speak in puns a lot and it’s just meant to be funny. Those sections are there to contrast contemporary society which is struggling with defining (and un-defining and re-defining) gender roles with the gender-equal utopia of the Ledom. I didn’t include those sections in the summary though because they’re more for illustration and don’t really impact the plot.

CW: This book contains strong sexism, transphobia, and intersex-phobia on the part of the characters but the main themes are pretty progressive, especially for the time.

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