Book Review: Ancillary Sword

Breq is a soldier who used to be a warship. Once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, now she only has a single body and serves the emperor she swore to destroy.

Given a new ship and a troublesome crew, Breq is ordered to the only place in the galaxy she will agree to go: Athoek station, to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew – a lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.

So I read the first book, Ancillary Justice, nine years ago, which was four years after it came out. This book came out a year after the first, but I'm just getting to it now. Why? Well, Goodreads friends of mine had mixed feelings about it and warned it was even more soaked in tea than the first book. But also, by then I'd discovered Murderbot and that's been a far more enjoyable series. In fact, I was wondering if I should re-read Ancillary Justice to see if my opinion of it (five stars) held up.

Not wishing it to collect any more dust on my nightstand, I read it. I'm glad I did, but I didn't love it. Yes, everyone is having tea, and they're having it all the time. It's right there on the very first page.

So the Radch, the name of the empire, comes across as Victorian era Great Britain: The non-stop tea drinking, priceless tea sets, tea plantations, indentured servitude, self-righteous attitudes towards the "uncivilized heathens", fussiness about manners, and aristocratic nobility getting anything they want because of who they are. I didn't get that in the first book, but here it's in our face. With Breq being granted a ship and the rank of Fleet Admiral, we're thrust onto the high seas with Athoek Station as port-of-call. I'm picturing Victorian navy uniforms, all epaulets and big hats.

I found myself more annoyed by usage of the feminine pronouns than in the first book (The Radch doesn't acknowledge gender, so the default is "she") for two reasons. The first is that the indentured people on the planet do acknowledge gender so Breq is forced to be respectful and use their proper pronouns and titles like "grandfather." She struggles to get it right (Wait a second, did I?). The second is that in the Radch navy, everyone uses "sir" to address officers. So everyone is addressed by the feminine all the time in the Radch, except in the navy when they're also addressed by the masculine. The switching back and forth from she to sir and back again was silly. And with more characters to deal with, I had to look for behavioral clues to figure it out. Why was that important? Well, as a reader, I'm always trying to concoct a picture of the character in my head, and Leckie's not making that easy for me. I think I got it right. Maybe.

Anyway, back to the story. The galactic intrigue is put on the backburner. There's a murder that could've been something, but it wound up being nothing other than an excuse for Breq to go down to the planet to observe a mourning ritual. Once there, the whole story turned into the whole Victorian British Empire tea plantation indentured-servitude-is-bad thing, which is fine, but not what I tuned into this series to read about.

Again, it was a fine read, but not what I was hoping for. And with the meh reviews of the third book in the series from my Goodreads friends, I don't know if I want to bother continuing with this series. I mean, there are only so many tea parties I can read about, particularly since my daughter is too old to have them with her stuffed animals.

3 stars

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Book Review: The End of All Things

Humans expanded into space and found a universe populated with multiple alien species bent on their destruction. Thus was the Colonial Union formed, to help protect us from a hostile universe. The Colonial Union used the Earth and its excess population for colonists and soldiers. It was a good arrangement...for the Colonial Union. Then the Earth said: no more.

Now the Colonial Union is living on borrowed time—a couple of decades at most, before the ranks of the Colonial Defense Forces are depleted and the struggling human colonies are vulnerable to the alien species who have been waiting for the first sign of weakness, to drive humanity to ruin. And there's another problem: A group, lurking in the darkness of space, playing human and alien against each other—and against their own kind—for their own unknown reasons.

In this collapsing universe, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson and the Colonial Union diplomats he works with race against the clock to discover who is behind attacks on the Union and on alien races, to seek peace with a suspicious, angry Earth, and keep humanity’s union intact...or else risk oblivion, and extinction—and the end of all things.

In the previous entry of this series, The Human Division, the book was a collection of a serialized stories bundled together with an overarching storyline. It didn't work for some people, but it worked for me. This entry gets to the bottom of the matter: Who's trying to sabotage the Colonial Union? The story is told over four novellas which offer varying viewpoints as to what's going on in different places and at different levels of society in Scalzi's Old Man's War universe.

The opening story is "The Life of the Mind" in which we see where all of the missing ships went. It's told from the viewpoint of Rafe Daquin, a computer programmer turned starship pilot who's just looking for work. He signs up for third string pilot aboard the Chandler and gets more than he ever bargained for. The ship is captured and he's forced to pilot the ship for Equilibrium, the organization looking to make life hell for the Colonial Union (CU). But despite being at their mercy at the outset, he plots his revenge.

"This Hollow Union" gives us a look inside the political operations of the Enclave, a confederation of 400 species who are united in their opposition to the CU and still smarting from their comeuppance at the conclusion of The Last Colony (Book 3). It's told by Hafte Sorvalh, the de facto number two of the Enclave. The Enclave is torn over what to do about Earth. Readers of the series will know that Earth told the CU to bugger off after they learned what the CU's been doing, not to mention that they believe the CU destroyed their space station. Some want to admit the Earth into the Enclave; others hate this idea as you just can't trust Humans. There's plenty of intrigue, and I admit to being caught off guard by the big reveal at the end.

"Can Long Endure" embeds you with a team of CU Marines as they're sent from one assignment to the next. CU colonies are upset and threatening to declare their independence. The CU can not allow that, and so the Marines are sent in to remind these would-be rebels that that would be a bad idea. Lt. Heather Lee listens to her squad debate matters from the CU's troubles to what's being served for lunch in the mess hall all while trying to stay above the fray and making sure that they focus on the job at hand. It's fairly lighthearted until the last world they're sent to and then Lt. Lee has had enough.

"To Stand or Fall" picks up where "Can Long Endure" leaves off. Lt. Harry Wilson narrates this one after appearing in "This Hollow Union." He's a realist, recognizing that the CU is falling apart but also that it's humanity's best chance for survival. Thanks to some clever interrogations, he's able to figure out the Enclave's grand plan that will tear everyone apart. The hard part is figuring out how to prevent it.

It's trademark Scalzi at the top of his game. He has characters you can root for, wonderful dialogue, and a worldview that I can get behind. While all of the worldbuilding was done at the beginning of the series and the aliens are people in rubber suits, I didn't mind. It works. It's solid entertainment for this reader.

4.5 stars

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Book Review - Black Star Rising

When a mysterious alien spacecraft approaches the Earth and demands to speak with the President of the United States, then destroys a large Pacific island to demonstrate its strength and its seriousness, you'd expect the President to talk. Problem is, in the late twenty-first century, there is no President—not even a United States. China rules the Americas, and to most people "US" and "USSR" are just quaint abbreviations in historical dictionaries. But the aliens prove unreasonable about accepting substitutes. So one Anglo rice-cultivator from the Heavenly Grain Collective farm near Biloxi, Mississippi is forced to begin an adventure that will take him from peasant to President, from Pettyman to Spaceman.

I remember when this book came out. I was subscribed to a science fiction book club (that might've even been the name), and this was the book of the month. I was intrigued by the cover and made a mental note to check it out in the future. Decades later, I found it at one of the used book sales I frequent and picked it up.

What a disappointment.

It's easy enough to picture this as an alternate future where the US vs. USSR nuclear war has happened and the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping have never happened. It's a bit stale, but not far-fetched. The far-fetched stuff comes later, after we meet the aliens. But I won't spoil that for any would-be readers.

The story starts off as satire, devolves to farce, and then falls flat trying to deliver some sort of message at the end.

The characters exist to advance the plot. I couldn't really root for any of them. We start with Castor, a man in his early 20s who has stars in his eyes but is pretty thick-headed about women. I felt a little bad for him early on, but that soon faded. There's a Chinese police detective in her 40s named Delilah who becomes Castor's sexual partner. Her constant denial of her feeling is over-the-top. Professor Fung Bohsien, aka Manyface, who has had the brains of dying people added to his in order to save their minds. The end result is a bit like multiple personality disorder. There are some alien characters, but to divulge anything about them would be a spoiler.

Pohl infuses the story with sexism and that attitude about sex that is common for sci-fi writers in the post "free love" era of the late 60s to mid-80s. It's very male fantasy oriented as that's who the target demographic was: teenaged boys and horny old sci-fi writers men. As a teenager in the 80s, I didn't know any better, but later as an adult, I realized wasn't real at all.

The coolest part of this book is the cover and the title. I should've just stuck with that rather than read it.

1 star

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Book Review: Children of Ruin

Long ago, Earth's terraforming program sent ships out to build new homes for humanity among the stars and made an unexpected discovery: a planet with life. But the scientists were unaware that the alien ecosystem was more developed than the primitive life forms originally discovered.

Now, thousands of years later, the Portiids and their Humans have sent an exploration vessel following fragmentary radio signals. They discover a system in crisis, warring factions trying to recover from an apocalyptic catastrophe arising from what the early terraformers awoke all those years before.

The book runs with two alternating storylines: the "present" (which is a joint venture between Portiids and Humans two generations after the events in Children of Time) and the distant past, roughly equivalent to the start of Children of Time. Eventually, the older timeline is advanced until it catches up to the present.

In the old timeline, we're introduced to a group of terraformers who've arrived in a system that, surprisingly, has life in it. Rather than destroy it, the terraformers split up: Half will study the lifeforms of the world (Nod), while the the other half will terraform the next planet out from the host star. Unlike Avrana Kern's expedition in Children of Time, there is no suicide bomber on board. Still, the Luddite faction back on Earth still manages to find a way to derail this batch of terraformers. But that isn't the worst of it, for Nod has an insidious lifeform of its own that threatens to devour everyone it encounters. There's a scene with serious The Thing vibes that I found terrifying.

Meanwhile, the terraformers successfully establish an octopus civilization on the other planet. Tchaikovsky does a fantastic job detailing how a sentient octopus thinks, behaves, and communicates and how their society might function. World building has always been his strong suit, and his ability to get inside alien minds is among the best in sci-fi.

So when the Kern's World expedition arrives, all signs point to some kind of war in progress. A scout ship sent to make contact finds out the hard way what's actually happening. The Humans and Portiids are still trying to iron out the wrinkles in their interspecies communication (vibrations for the spiders, vocalized language for the humans) and now they find that octopuses primarily communicate via color.

The book is a bit of a slow burn, and sometimes it seemed like Tchaikovsky was retreading the same old ground and story points. There were long passages of summarizing, where centuries of the octopus civilization's progress was told in anthropological fashion. It wasn't bad—Tchaikovsky manages to keep it interesting—but it can be dry and pads the word count. I think this book could be 10% shorter. It was at the midway point that the story's pace really picked up. Since I didn't bail, that's proof enough that Tchaikovsky knows what he's doing.

4 stars

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Draft2Digital Adding Fees

If you're an author who uses Draft2Digital for publishing your work, then you already know what I'm about to post. For the rest of you, read on.

Draft2Digital sent out an email this week informing its clients that they're going to add user fees to their platform. The first is account activation fees. Due to "automated content farms" overwhelming them with "slop," (in other words, AI-written books) they're requiring a one-time $20 fee to set up an account. Combined with "verification tools and human reviewers," they hope to cut down on those clowns that are abusing the system.

I'm ok with this. Granted, I'm an existing account holder so I'm exempt from this fee. However, the next one hits me, and I'd imagine probably about 90% of the authors who use their service.

There will now be an annual maintenance fee of $12 applied to all "accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D's commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee." (emphasis on "net" is mine)

So if your book sales suck, which admittedly is most of us indie authors, you're not pulling your weight. We apparently need to up our game because we're a drain on their margins. As if we're not dealing with enough production costs (editing, typesetting, cover art) and marketing costs (ad campaigns, giveaways, paid reviews, etc.), we now have the added pressure of meeting our digital printer's revenue quota or else pay an annual fee. Swell.

As Smashwords is a D2D property, expect to see their FREE section to dwindle to next to nothing (well, successful authors can introduce the first book in a series for free to lure readers in and hope they can hook them for the rest of the series). In the past, Smashwords published statistics showing that the vast majority (90+%) of books that were purchased from them were books listed for free.

Needless to say, I am unhappy about this. I typically list my books for $2.99. After D2D takes their cut, I get $1.78. So I need to sell 57 copies to avoid the additional $12. If you think that's easy, then you don't know how difficult indie publishing is.

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Book Review: The Rosewater Insurrection

All is quiet in the city of Rosewater as it expands on the back of the gargantuan alien Wormwood. Those who know the truth of the invasion keep the secret.

The government agent Aminat, the lover of the retired sensitive Kaaro, is at the forefront of the cold, silent conflict. She must capture a woman who is the key to the survival of the human race. But Aminat is stymied by the machinations of the Mayor of Rosewater and the emergence of an old enemy of Wormwood...

Whereas the first story in this series is told from the perspective of Kaaro, xenosphere sensitive and S45 agent, he takes a back seat here while Thompson tells the tale of Rosewater Insurrection from multiple perspectives. There's Aminat, S45 agent and Kaaro's girlfriend; Alyssa, a woman who can't remember who she is or any of her family; Jack Jacques, the mayor of Rosewater; and Anthony, the avatar of the alien Wormwood that is the heart of Rosewood. There are also a handful of minor characters who help move the story along: Eric the assasin, Walter the author, and Bewon the disgruntled guy.

Thompson doesn't waste much time getting to the insurrection referenced in the title. The president of Nigeria insists that Rosewood have elections and already has a candidate in mind. He's intent on driving Jacques out of office, but the mayor resists and declares Rosewater's independence. This pisses off the president, who calls in the military to violently put down the insurrection. Jacques is counting on Wormwood to protect the city, but something's amiss.

Anthony intuitively knows that something is making Wormwood sick, so he seeks out the cause. Meanwhile, as the bombs fall and bullets fly, Aminat is trying to find Alyssa and bring her in for study as S45 thinks there's a connection between her and the alien.

In Rosewood, we only got to see Aminat through Kaaro's eyes, but she really comes into her own here. She has to walk a fine line between her love for Kaaro and following her boss's orders to bring in Alyssa, made all the more difficult by the battle raging in the city. Alyssa is treated to her own evolution from selfish amnesiac to something more. I admit it took me a while to appreciate her as a character. And we get the mayor's backstory too. Parts of it will certainly have some readers thinking TMI, but it does help explain how he became the man he is.

The Nigeria that Thompson describes in 2066 is as complicated as it is today. Thompson doesn't sugarcoat his descriptions of the place. Suburbs and modern technology are countered by poverty and criminal gangs. The line between politicians and crime lords is a thin one. "The Tired Ones," an organization that Mayor Jacques has been involved with for decades, offers a sober perspective revealing the continent's nations are still stuck in a kind of adolescence.

Thompson also offers us a look into the homeworld of Wormwood. While it seemed in Rosewater that the aliens might've been benevolent in their colonization of Earth, Insurrection reveals that the aliens aren't on a moral high ground compared to us humans. Like us, they're not a monolithic people. All you can do is hope that the good guys win. It might be difficult to determine that though.

4.25 stars

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Book Review: Sundiver

In all the universe, no species has ever reached for the stars without the guidance of a patron—except perhaps mankind. Did some mysterious race begin the uplift of humanity aeons ago? And if so, why did they abandon us? Circling the sun, under the caverns of Mercury, Expedition Sundiver prepares for the most momentous voyage in our history. A journey into the boiling inferno of the sun... to seek our destiny in the cosmic order of life.

Brin's Uplift Saga was easily one of my favorite series way back in my younger days. The thing is, I started with the second book (Startide Rising), being unaware that the series started with Sundiver. I always meant to get to it, but didn't have a chance until now. Having done so, I'm going to re-read the six-book series which was published from 1980-1998.

So as the book blurb states, no species has ever reached the stars without the guidance of a patron. But somehow, Humans were able to do it on their own. It is an amazing feat, if true. However, it came with a few tradeoffs. On the negative side, we had to invent everything that the Galactic Library just teaches the other races, not to mention our species' tumultuous adolescence (wars, pollution, etc.). But on the positive side, we were spared the indentured servitude client races have to endure at the behest of their patrons. These can go on for hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

While a few races cheer us on, the vast majority see us as enigma or worse, an abomination. Surely, the Humans must've had a patron at one point but for some inexplicable reason, abandoned the uplift process, a crime by galactic standards.

Rumors are circulating that clues to our patron can be found inside the sun, so an expedition is underway to search for those clues. How can a spaceship possibly survive a trip into the sun? Well, there's a back-of-the-envelope style explanation that Brin gives us and it involves a refrigerator laser and thermodynamic equations that I don't fully understand, but he holds a doctorate in astrophysics, so I trust him that it's legit even if the technology is currently beyond us.

So besides the human crew and passengers, there are some alien representatives going along as advisors and witnesses, some friendly, some not. Jacob is our protagonist, who was invited to go along by Fagin, a Kanten (a mobile, tree-like species), to serve as an investigator. The story is primarily told from Jacob's viewpoint. Also present are the commander of the ship, Helene deSilva; Bubbacup, a Pila representative from the Galactic Library; his assistant Culla, a Pring, who are a client race to the Pila (pictured on the cover); Dr. Kepler, the Human head of the mission; Dr. Martine, a psychologist; and LaRoque, a politically charged journalist invited along to write about the mission.

Brin crafts the story as a mystery. There's a murder to go along with schemes to end the mission with disappointment or failure—depending on the schemer. It's up to Jacob and his fellows to figure things out to save Earth's reputation and (mild spoiler) their lives, for the stakes are higher than they realize.

All in all, an enjoyable read.

4 stars

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