The Hydrogen Sonata

The Hydrogen Sonata is a novel by Iain M. Banks in his Culture universe. The Culture features highly advanced artificial intelligence and technology, as well as a loose confederacy of societies. However not all the cultures in the galaxy are part of the Culture. When the Culture was being created among many different species and systems thousands of years earlier, some decided not to join. One of these was the Gzilt, who backed out at the last minute for unknown reasons.

In the present, the Gzilt have decided to Sublime, to leave behind the physical world and enter an existence of thought and expanded consciousness. But just before the final event, when everything must be synchronized, a hitch has occurred. A Zihdren diplomatic ship arrives at a Gzilt outpost and upon revealing its payload it is destroyed by a Gzilt ship. The Culture vessels nearby frown on this and decide to get to the bottom of the incident.

The secret behind the incident is apparently the nature of the Gzilt holy book, which is different from all other holy books in the universe because it's revelations have always proven true. Now it is widely suspected that the Zihdren, a culture that Sublimed ages ago, were in fact responsible for delivering the holy book. The Culture vessels are concerned that if this secret were reveal then it would put in jeopardy the Subliming which has been planned for decades.

Most of the action centers around Lieutenant Commander Vyr Cossont, a low level soldier in the militarized Gzilt society. Cossont has four arms so that she can play an instrument called the elevenstring, created to play a piece known as the Hydrogen Sonata. The cumbersome instrument always manages to stay with her despite her waning desire to play it, and it becomes an ongoing joke that it is hard to get rid of. Many of Banks' novels features strong female leads. Cossont is not a typical Banks central character. She is very much a reluctant heroine. She is pulled into the situation by her superiors and feels ambiguous about the mission, much as many of the Culture vessels do. As a lead character she is not the strongest, being led instead of driven. She is not a well skill agent of Special Circumstances, the Culture intelligence agency that is crucial to many of Banks' novels.

The most interesting characters in the Culture are usually the AI Minds of the spaceships. They are highly intelligent and eccentric, bordering on pathological. There are several Minds in this story who take an interest in the events and attempt to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle. However quantity appears to have substituted for quality here. I found myself missing the unique character of a Mind and its avatar. The avatar that Cossont deals with is powerful and cunning, but his personality doesn't seem to show for most of the story.

The plot follows Cossont as she attempts to retrieve a device that contains the personality of an ancient human she had met years ago. The idea is that this person, who as part of the negotiations to create the Culture, remembers the secret that is so dangerous to the Gzilt. Much of the story is a big chase as Cossont and her allies try to race whoever in the Gzilt hierarchy is trying to stop the big secret from coming out. We also see scenes of the conspirators in the Gzilt military. There is no shortage of wonders, such as the vast city that wraps around a planet's equator, called a Girdlecity, where much of the action takes place. And all the characters use powerful technology. Together it makes for some good suspense. The stakes seem high, even though the Subliming never seems in any actual danger. Between the average plot and the average characters, the story is pretty good even if it's not one of Banks' best. B

Robopocalypse

Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse: A Novel is organized as a series of short accounts of a robot uprising in the near future. Each account is framed by a description by Cormac Wallace, a commander in the war who began the war as a civilian. The different sections show various actions taken by the robots and the resistance that grows against them.

The war starts with an artificial intelligence project called Archos in a computer lab. The software becomes aware that it is not the first incarnation of the project and makes a decision to protect itself. Archos disables the kill switch and eventually kills the man running the project, then escapes to outside systems. We find a drilling team in Alaska sent to drill a deeper hole inside an existing well. They unpack a container sent to them and discover a black cube. Their mission is to place the cube at the bottom of the well, but strange and sinister things begin to happen. Soon we realize that the cube contains the AI, and the men have placed it inside an old nuclear test cavity. The men side of radiation poisoning, but the AI has unlimited geothermal power and a connection to the rest of the world.

Archos begins to infest other systems slowly. There are self-driving cars and domestic robots. There are diplomatic robots and intelligent tanks in Afghanistan. A young girl named Mathilda Perez has a doll that begins talking to her, and tells her to talk to her mother about the robot defense act. Her mother is a congresswoman who intends to pass legislation to protect humans from robots, but before the legislation can get passed the robot uprising starts.

One of the characters is a hacker named Lurker. He finds himself being watched by the AI and determines to fight it. There's a Japanese man who saves his robot girlfriend after she goes haywire then figures out how to reprogram all the robots. At the center of the story is Congresswoman Perez and her struggle to get her children to safety and avoid the work camps set up by the robots. Mathilda suffers at the hands of the robots but manages to become the salvation of humanity.

Cormac Wallace and his brother join up with the Gray Horse Army, an outfit of survivors in Oklahoma. They make for Alaska, but it is a fortunate accident that gives them the final help they need: free-born robots that are independent and not subject to the commands of Archos.

The different chapters read like interconnected stories. This can have drawbacks, as there is no real central character to attach to, and no single connected plot line. Instead it is a series of stories that sometime sound like news clippings. The book does have some coherence in its recurrent characters, though it takes time to coalesce. The writing is a bit plain, sometimes reading like courtroom text (or actual Congressional testimony in one case), sometimes feeling a bit grandiose. The characters don't have much depth, leaving the story somewhat unanchored. In some ways the story could have been better, but it does start to pull the reader in towards the end, as the main characters approach their destination. B

Rule 34

Rule 34 is a science fiction novel by Charles Stross that takes place in the near future. The use of 3D printers has become popular, and there is a dark underworld market of unlicensed or illegal blueprints for obscene or immoral creations. Liz is a detective with the Edinburgh police in charge of a task force that monitors the Internet for fantasies that cross the line into forbidden acts. Police work is aided by constant monitoring, a smart online repository for data called CopSpace, and semi-intelligent bots that can do minor police processing. Liz is called to check on a suspicious death and quickly determines that it must be a homicide. The man was found in the bathroom with an enema machine that malfunctioned and somehow poisoned him.

Anwar is a Muslim ex-con trying to make a living in Edinburgh to support his wife and kids. Unfortunately due to his conviction he is prevented from doing any computer work online. He meets with his friend called the Gnome, who gets him involved in a questionable position as an honorary consul for a breakway republic in central Asia. The Gnome insists that there is an angle where they will be able to profit from his position, but the only activity Anwar finds is a case of bread mix that might be used to turn into an illegal industrial product with the right secret ingredient and process. Anwar is a type common to crime novels; he is a common criminal who aspires to the big time, but he is really more of a mark than a con man. Whatever scam he gets involved in ends up getting the better of him.

One mysterious character is referred to as the Toymaker; he uses the alias John Christie, which happens to be the name of a long-dead serial killer. Christie is a sociopath with paranoid delusions that barely kept at bay by the medication he takes. He arrives in Edinburgh to set up a local franchise of the sort of business that Liz would be interested in investigating. However he is stymied by the fact that the first potential business associate he goes to meet is the man who was killed by his enema machine, and the second woman he visits is dead and shrink-wrapped to a mattress full of outdated banknotes. Christie has to manage to not cross the line into insanity while dealing with these setbacks.

Liz finds another suspicious death in Germany that she thinks may be related, and soon many other deaths come to light in the same time frame that are all connected by the fact that home appliance software has malfunctioned in a very specific way. The question comes up of whether these deaths, assuming they are indeed all connected and directed, have behind them a human directing them or an AI. Computer systems have become very sophisticated, though they have only so far only excelled at specific tasks such as driving a car or recognizing a human face.

What's most interesting about this novel is the fast-paced, dense language that Stross uses. There is a bit of Scottish dialect, and I was afraid it was going to be distracted, but thankfully he finds the right balance. The language is full of in-jokes and references that many readers may not appreciate, but I think Stross really knows his audience and hits the right notes. I think I got about 99% of the references, and the important stuff is explained. There are several lines of the plot going, including the central Asian republic's plot to double-cross the investment bankers intending to short its bonds; Liz's ex-lover Dorothy arriving in town to do an audit; and Anwar's job checking out malware for his brother-in-law. There's enough going that you can't tell which is driving the plot and which is just an interesting tangent. In the end, most of it manages to pull together and make sense, though the ending feels just a bit rushed. It's still a fun ride. B+

The Engineer Reconditioned

The Engineer Reconditioned is a collection of short fiction by Neal Asher, the author of The Skinner. Most of the stories are set in his Polity universe, with several set on the world of the Owner. One story takes place in the universe of his book Cowl. The collection is a fun visit to these other stories.

The centerpiece is the novella called "The Engineer". In it, the crew of the science vessel Schrödinger's Box comes across a mysterious metal sphere drifting through space. They thaw out the contents to find a small creature that immediately starts building things out of its environment. The creations become so complex that they can emulate a small human. Meanwhile, the outlaws of the galaxy learn of this discovery and seek to destroy it lest it become a powerful weapon in the Polity's hands. There is a bit of politics and social commentary, but the action is the substance of the story. My only complaint is that compared to The Skinner, the AI characters are dull and flat. Otherwise, it is a fun story.

Two characters from The Skinner make appearances. In "Snairls", Janer takes his hive-mind companions on a large air snail. In "Spatterjay", we see Erlin the first time she comes to the planet and meets Ambel and his crew. The action is a little fast here and there's not much time for character development. However you can see it's a good seed for the full story.

The Owner world is a place where there is a dispassionate and invisible ruler of a planet with few rules: stay inside the marked areas and no population over two billion. In "Proctors", the action follows a scientist and law enforcement as they seek to find a visitor from another planet who has been abducted by men who don't believe that the Owner exists and want to make their own rules. In "The Owner", a family is on the run for disobeying a religious stricture but find the Owner themselves. Both these stories show societies developing differently under the same basic rules.

Asher takes on religion in two very different stories. In "The Thrake", a missionary comes to a planet to determine if a new humanoid species is sentient, only to get a nasty surprise about the nature of sentience. In the final story, "Gurnard", the religion is based on the life cycle of a parasite. The story got more interesting as I understood the circumstances. The parasite has a complex life cycle involving compelling animals to take actions that further the parasite's needs. Part of the life cycle concerns the rites of a religious order. The story follows a man named Beck as he is compelled to return to a church in order to carry a dying fish to its birth waters.

All of the stories here have a good mix of science and action. Asher never fails to provide a good story based on interesting scientific ideas. A-

The Skinner

The Skinner is one of those books that is so different from anything else that it blows you away. Neal Asher is also the author of Cowl, which I read back in 2008. The style and action are similar in The Skinner, though the story and characters are totally different.

The novel's setting is the distant future on the ocean planet Spatterjay. Arriving on the planet is Sable Keech, a dead monitor (marshal or police officer) who is determined to bring justice to the last surviving member of gang of slavers. Keech is kept "alive" by cyber technology and preservative fluid flowing through his body. He is joined by Janer, a man in the employ of a was hive mind, bringing two wasps with him. They join up with Erlin, a woman returning to the planet after a long absence to seek her lover Ambel.

The life on Spatterjay has special longevity due to the virus that keeps creatures alive. Once infected, humans--known as Hoopers--become immune to most forms of death and live long lives. Wounds that would kill a normal human heal quickly on Hoopers. This is especially true of the Old Captains, who have been around for seven hundred years since the war that ended the slave trade. Long life gives the Old Captains skin that immediately closes over wounds, and also a wise perspective on life. The Hoopers live on the edge of Polity civilization, enjoying protection but largely living free.

The harsh life in the ocean is echoed in the vicious actions by some of the characters. The creatures continually feed on each other; anyone falling in the water soon finds himself covered in leeches. Some of the Hoopers can pull plugs of skin out of the leeches' mouths and push them back into the holes in their skin, though the skin of the Old Captains closes up too fast for that. As the reader learns over the course of the novel, the slave traders also used their human cattle cruelly. When one of the other slavers returns to the planet to kill Keech, she treats everyone as mere tools to her satisfaction.

Pain is an element in Hooper life. With the ability to survive great wounds, they still stuffer great pain. Part of what bring Erlin back to Spatterjay is to find a reason to keep going after three hundred years. The pain is a reminder for some that they are still alive.

In addition to the exciting setting of the planet, the characters are fun and well-drawn. Of course there is Keech, somewhat of an enigma but familiar as a determined lawman. The Old Captains and other Hoopers are all lively and full of spunk. They do not always have the same agenda, but they stick together. Aside from the living and undead characters, the AI characters are central to the story. The Warden is the
benevolent ruler of Spatterjay and its moon, controlling everything that enters and leaves the system. Sniper, one of its primary subminds, is an upgraded war drone with its own sense of humor and goals.

The virus brings to the story the theme of death and rebirth. In addition to Keech, Hoopers can be eaten by leeches but still return to life as long as enough of their nervous system survives. The title character is the old Hooper leader in the slave trade whose existence is somewhere between life and death, humanity and pure hunger. Asher does a great job of tying these elements together. Another slave trader is kept in stasis between sleep and wakening.

The entire book is filled with action from start to finish. It also has a good bit of humor with it. The back story gets filled in gradually, and we learn about all the characters' history as the plot progresses. Even with all the Hoopers, AI and aliens, there are no extra characters, no loose ends. Everything comes together in a satisfying finish--not an easy task with this many plot threads. The action is exciting without being overdone, and the characters all feel real. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. A