[books 2016] Charles Stross

48. Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross

Of Stross' books, I've read all of the Laundry novels and the detective stories (Halting State and Rule 34). I thought I should read some of his sci-fi and this was sitting on the shelf at the library at an opportune time.

The voice is totally different from the two series that I've read (which are different from each other, but quite close). It's a lot more difficult to read as hes examining more complex concepts.

In the far future where biological humans have been extinct for thousands of years, synthetic people are colonising space. There is no faster than light travel, with complicated implications for finance. A mendicant scholar who studies the history of finance is looking for her missing sister, who may or may not hold the key to a missing space colony and the biggest financial scam of all time. She is being chased by their mother (a real piece of work), a spacefaring cult whose ship is a gothic cathedral (yes, that's as great as it sounds) and a ship of pirates/insurance underwriters who have taken on a giant bat form.

In other words, it's good fun as well as dealing with difficult concepts. Stross digs deeply into the economics of colonising space. At times this felt like a Ken Macleod book - he even uses the line "early days of a better nation" which is, of course, the title of Macleod's blog.

It took me a while to get into it but couldn't put the last third down; recommended.

[books 2016] Ken Macleod

49. The Corporation Wars: Dissidence by Ken Macleod

In the far future, a bunch of robots who are supposed to be mining/terraforming a planet achieve sentience and refuse to work. So the company brings back to "life" backups taken of the worst war criminals in the last world war to fight them. Except that none of them are quite what they seem.

I'm a huge fan of Ken's work but this didn't do it for me. It had its moments, but I think this is my least favourite of all of his books.

[Book 2016] Historical crime

50. Beloved Poison by ES Thomson

I heard about this in the Guardian. It's shortlisted for a Scottish crime fiction award (the McIlvanney). The rest of the contenders are the usual suspects, but, as a historical novel, this caught my interest. Not enough to buy it, obviously, that's what libraries are for.

It's set in a crumbling hospital that used to be a monastery in 1850s London which is being shut down to make way for a railway station. Everything we learn about the place leads the reader to believe this is no bad thing.

The narrator is Jem Flockhart, the hospital's apothecary, who is a woman living as a man because there has been a Flockhart as the apothecary at St Saviour's for generations and her father had no sons. A lot of readers have complained that this is a cliche (I went on to Goodreads and immediately needed to shower.) Look, assholes, there's three choices to deal with women as protagonists in historical novels and apparently they all make people bitch. Either you don't use women, and that's just not acceptable to a lot of modern readers. Or you have women as women, and the sexists masquerading as sticklers for historical accuracy shout you down. Or you can use the cross dressing trope (and, interestingly, more evidence is coming to light that this actually happened a lot more than has been previously thought) and get accused of being a cliche. Representation matters, people, so STFU if that's the worst criticism you can come up with.

Interestingly, as the novel goes on it becomes more obvious that Jem and his/her father haven't been fooling many people but they've all gone along with it.

Jem becomes friends with a young architect sent to supervise the demolition works. They find six tiny coffins hidden in a disused chapel (more than a little reminiscent of the real-life mystery of the six miniature coffins found in Scotland which has been used as a basis for many a modern book). They start to investigate and people start dying.

I had a mixed reaction to this book. Thomson has a PhD in the history of medicine so that part is spot on. She captures the Victorian era reasonably well. It falls short of pitching you right into the era as the Shardlake books do to the Tudor era, but those books are my benchmark. She makes an overly heavy-handed use of foreshadowing. However, the literal and figurative claustrophobia of the hospital environment is unsettling and there was enough going on that I wanted to find out what happened next.

Overall, not bad for a first book. However, it's supposed to be the first in a series and while I think it was a good stand-alone book, I didn't find anything about it a good basis for a series. Not convinced I will be following up.

[Books 2016] SFF anthology

51. Transtories edited by Colin Harvey

I picked up this collection at a previous Bristol Con and have just got round to reading it in time for this year's. The late Colin Harvey was involved with the Bristol SFF scene but I never met him; the only person I know who has a story in here is Joanne Hall.

This is a collection of stories linked only by each being based (loosely) around a word beginning with "trans". It's an ecclectic and uneven collection (at least for me).

It stars out well with a story by Aliette de Bodard, The Axle of Heaven. I'd heard good things about her and off the back of this I bought one of her books in the recent big Hodder ebook sale.

Transference by Jay Carlsberg was interesting and thought-provoking, as was Transthermal by John Kenny. Jo's offering, The Snake on His Shoulder, was good fun (locking the devil in the bell tower is always fun right?). I also enjoyed Shopping for Children by Susanne Martin, set in a future where having children the natural way is no longer possible. Silver by Rob Rowntree was an interesting concept but had more domestic violence than I really want in a steampunk adventure. Rainbows & Unicorns by Cody L Stanford is brutal and heartbreaking but really, really good. Oh, for the Touch Tentacular by Jonathan Shipley, about a student trying to earn a living on an alien world where the sapient life forms are sauropod and concepts don't translate particularly well, was funny.

The rest didn't do much for me. I've discovered this month that stories set in post-human universes tend to make me bounce right off (the Stross book excepted), and two of the stories are that exact kind of thing.

In other words, it's like many collections - the good stuff is good indeed, but a lot is pretty disposable. Can't fault it for the variety of the stories - at no point did it all start to get same-y.