Long Earth is a callaboration and thus pretty good. Terry has done at least six collaborations three of them sciences books and one of the others Good Omens, so there was no hesitation. A slight departure from most of his books this novel was aimed at a mature audience, no mature themes, just not the humour we expect from TP. This is a novel that is lacking in serious plot, the one problem that I had with it, but not all books need a strong plot, sometimes it is nice to explore a concept that you have in your head. This is SciFi, it is in the nearfuture. Most of the characters were have been born and the store is in two distinct time periods, one in a few years time and the other a decade later.
First someone invents machine that allows people to move to parallel worlds and then he releases the plans on the Internet. The book is what happens and the problem with the other worlds. Oh yeah there is a sentient soda machine too.
John Scalzi is this guy, actually he is a guy and an author, a really good author actually. At this point I am not sure if I wrote on him before on his series Old Man's War and Fuzzy Nation, but I am here now writing about his new book Red Shirts.
This is Science Fiction and a comedy. Really it is not Science Fiction … it is a Comedy …. Okay the premise of the story is that the crew of a starship in a galactic empire. The crew has noticed that people who go on away missions with the bridge crew die, usually in a horrible gruesome manner and the crew of the ship are clueing in; they are actively avoiding the bridge crew. Only the new guys have no idea this theory but they do find out, the hard way. This is their story.
I found the novel very entertaining following the lead of the expendable crew members of the death ship loosely based on the starship Enterprise, first series, as they intrepidly attempt to discover the cause of the weirdness and death and try to stop it.
But if you read the jacket it is an awesomely funny story, so said some really good writers that I like. But I thought it was entertaining, but not hysterically funny.
Time for some serious SciFi.
The Drowned Cities. Paolo Bacigalupi does it again, his second book in this not so fictional Earth in out near distant Future. Refresher— humans are stupid and global warming happens, oh wait it is happening, so humans are stupid and time has passed and the effects are here. The sea level has risen, the climate has been radically changed, peak oil has come and passed, there is none left and America has collapsed, completely. The last book occurred on the Gulf coast and this book takes place in another city. Yes I know the city but I spent half the book trying to figure it out. The only character that exists in both books is Tool, the augmented human.
We get to learn about a couple of different things in this book. Good SciFi should not concentrate on the setting, but the setting should be integral to the plot in some way. The setting is in Dystopia Future America and the themes that I can see are various aspects of human nature. Who is more Human, the humans or the Mutant. The nature of pacifism vs survivalism. The psychotic nature of humanity.
I took a course in University called Modes of Fantasy, we read a number of books on utopic views and dystopic too. This book would have worked far better than Heart of Darkness and Night combined. This book is grim. Grim and thrilling. Grim and current with some of the fucked up things that are happening in today's dark societies. There are several factions at war in this fucked up society. This book makes The Hunger Games look like a walk in the park, and the kicker is that Paolo did not make this shit up. Go look up the Lord's Resistance Army. If you can stomach that then you should read this book because you are a sick fucker. If it disturbs you, then this book will disturb you. If you like good books then you should read this disturbing book.
So in conclusion, Paolo Bacigalupi and The Drowned Cities five stars,
John Scalzi and Redshirts four stars.
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter The Long Earth three stars.
Mental note, go read Stephen Baxter and see why Terry Pratchett likes him enough to write with him.
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