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On this page are some comments on various books I have read, most of which I mentioned in my Journal. I have listed them by author surname. As of 2025, many of the books read – namely, science fiction and fantasy – I have since lost interest in.

William Barton

When Heaven Fell

Earth has been conquered by aliens, and the story features a human mercenary, Athol Morrison, returning to Earth after fighting on other worlds for decades. I had mixed feelings after reading this. On one hand it was a bleakly cynical tale, perhaps more realistic and than many of this genre; the protagonist was a pragmatic type and not always very likable. One notable aspect of the novel – and one that makes it very much R-rated (even X-rated) – are the explicit descriptions of Athol either thinking about or engaging in sex; not occasionally but every other page it seemed. This part of the novel seemed gratuitous to me and I do not enjoy such inclusions at all in general, and so I skimmed past these scenes.

On the other hand there were some descriptions of alien landscapes that were quite lyrical, and the alien characters were well-depicted (though some were also grotesque at times). There was also a hint of hope near the end for the enslaved aliens. So I still hesitantly recommend the novel, but be aware that it is brutal and explicit in some scenes.

Greg Bear

Silentium, 2013

This is the third in the Forerunner novels he wrote for the Halo franchise. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years or so as I had lost interest in starting it, but finally managed to motivate myself to! The novel won’t make much sense for anyone not familiar with the Halo game universe; it is very fan-centric. I don’t know if I actually enjoyed it; the story was competently written (Greg Bear is a well-known “hard” sci-fi writer) but not particularly cheering as it narrates the destruction of the highly-advanced civilization of the Forerunners. It is perhaps not as personal as the previous two novels, which were told from the perspective of the young Bornstellar, accompanied by two species of human he befriended. I will have to read the first two novels again to refresh my memory. (3/3/2017 Journal)

C. J. Cherryh

One of my all-time favorite authors is C.J. Cherryh, who writes science fiction and some fantasy. I can’t remember when I first started reading her novels – perhaps the early 1990s.

She does alien-human interactions very well; the aliens aren’t there merely to be shot at but are complex characters in their own right. I also like how she portrays her male characters – they are not the aggressive “alpha male” types who tend to feature in male-authored sci-fi novels, but are more flawed and realistic (in my view) without going to the other extreme – the overly-emoting males found in the more romance-orientated sci-fi by female authors. My only concern is that she is getting old (born 1942); I hope she is around for a long time yet!

My favorite of all her books is the Faded Sun trilogy. I love the Mri and their vaguely Middle-Eastern/Samurai tribal culture, a very rigid caste system, and their stubborness in maintaining it and resisting change.

Another favorite is Hunter of Worlds, a singular novel featuring a predatory alien species called the iduve and their dominance of other aliens (including humans). My favorite aliens in Hunter of Worlds are (perhaps not surprisingly) the iduve; they are quite scary at times!

Both mri and iduve are humanoid in appearance, but not in nature. Both novels feature a lone human male protagonist interacting with the various aliens.

I have made a page with descriptions of the aliens and brief glossaries of their languages.

The Foreigner series are her current novel output, and depicts the adventures of Bren Cameron, a naturalized human ambassador between a human island colony on an alien planet, and the native alien species, the atevi. There is a lot of detail on various atevi clan machinations and rivalries, as well as ventures into space and interactions with yet more aliens in the later books. The 18th book was released in 2017! So you really need to begin with the first book. The novels are not long, though, so reading them all is not such a daunting task. The worldbuilding by now is quite detailed and extensive, though the atevi have become a bit more “humanized” as the novels progress, perhaps too much so. The series also feels like it has become stale at times; some of the novels have been a chore to get through.

A table of characters and places (not made by me) is here and “His History of the Aishidi’tat” from Book 15, Peacemaker, gives an overview of events as narrated by two main characters, the human Paidhi Bren Cameron, and the atevi Lord Tabini. (30/1/2015 Journal)

Ernest Cline

I finished Armada by Ernest Cline. A teenager, Zack Lightman, finds his daydreams of escaping his mundane life through the scenarios derived from the science-fiction movies, books and games he consumes turning into reality. The majority of these are from the 1980s onwards, and there are a lot of referrals and quotes from all this pop culture media scattered through the text. As I daydream of such scenarios for myself (and was a teenager in the 1980s!), I could relate to the character and I generally enjoyed the story. It is a lightweight tale, but entertaining enough, and there were some genuinely moving scenes. A lot of readers and reviewers seem to have disliked it, however. I am now currently reading his first novel, Ready Player One (28/1/2018 Journal).

Some thoughts later on:

I am listening to the Wil Wheaton-narrated audiobook of Ready Player One, which is making it somewhat more bearable to plow through (though his voice can grate after a while), but I don’t know if I will finish it at the moment.

The setting, a dystopian future, is initially interesting, though the author does not go into much detail about it. I initially felt some empathy with the main character as I could relate to retreating to a virtual fantasy world in preference to reality.

The endless 80s pop culture trivia and mentions gets very tedious, even though, like the author (who was born in 1972), I am of Generation X and was a teenager in the 80s.

In contrast with The Tiger’s Daughter, the prose style is ugly, utilitarian and dreary.

A certain sexually explicit paragraph in chapter 19 was quite off-putting for me, and soured me more on the story.

I was not, and am not, into gaming, so the monomaniacal focus on this as the plot – a virtual quest to solve puzzles and retrieve objects within the OASIS – ultimately bored me. The players are referred to as “Gunters” – a portmanteau of “egg hunters” (“Easter eggs” being hidden clues throughout the virtual world).

Much of this criticism can also be leveled at the author’s next novel, Armada. I listened to the audiobook to get through this, as well. Though I initially liked parts of it, and could relate to the main character somewhat (who dreams of escaping his mundane reality), the story is similarly a 1980s-nostalgia-driven narrative. On reflection, I do not think I could read it again and there were distasteful elements to that story as well, such as the main character describing his mother: “My mother was also ridiculously beautiful. I know people are supposed to say things like that about their mothers, but in my case it happened to be a fact. Few young men know the Oedipal torment of growing up with an insanely hot, perpetually single mom.” Ugh.

Both novels are lightweight and ultimately forgettable. There are plenty of critical reviews about them on the Internet. (10/2/2018 Journal entry)

I did finish RP1, but the ending was a bit abrupt (essentially “and they lived happily ever after” with no further details).

Kevin Dockery and Douglas Niles

Starstrike series

I read a somewhat silly science fiction/Space Marines novel called Starstrike: Operation Orion (the second in a series; I have yet to read the first as it wasn’t available at the bookshop then). Sometimes (actually a lot of the time) I am in the mood for a book where you don’t have to think too much, and I get a perverse enjoyment at getting irritated at such stories as in the novel. (The Amazon.com reviews are mostly negative, too! The cover art is nice, though.) The main annoyance (aside from the clichéd Space Marines) is that the three “alien” races in the novel look just like humans! (Aside from odd eye colors – see the extract below.) An amazing (and unlikely) evolutionary coincidence, unless there is some explanation that has yet to be given (such as DNA seeding by another real alien race long ago).

The distinctive physical difference between the races of the three galactic empires, of course, lay in the color of the pupils irises? of the eyes: the Shamaini tended toward shades of red, from bright crimson to pale pink; the Eluoi covered the same range in the green spectrum; and Assarn eyes were cobalt blue. However, hair color was another telltale sign. The Shamani he had met all had hair as black as the typical Asian’s. The hair of the Eluoi varied between coarse dark brown and black, and the few Assarn he had encountered – including Olin Parvik and his crew – were Viking blond or redheaded.

Most of the novel consists of the Space Marines going to various planets and shooting the hapless (and curiously incompetent) “aliens” (whom I felt a bit sorry for after a while). I guess I could use the battle scenes for reference if I ever wanted to write that sort of thing, but these got really tedious after a few pages! (1/6/2008 Journal)

I am now reading Starstrike: Task Force Mars, and it’s as silly as the second in the series. The Space Marines are walking clichés, the “aliens” look exactly like humans but with oddly-colored eyes and the bad aliens are just cannon fodder. The Space Marines go from one battle to another and almost never meet a really challenging enemy. It’s the sort of novel to read when you don’t want to think too much (I tend to read those sorts of books these days!). (20/7/2008 Journal)

Mary Gentle

Golden Witchbreed

A human ambassador, Christie, travels to an alien world which has humanoid (but not human) inhabitants, the Ortheans. An advanced civilization once dominated there thousands of years ago, its people nicknamed the “Golden Witchbreed,” but it self-destructed and collapsed. The surviving people continue living in a less advanced society – somewhat equivalent to a medieval era – to the present day in the novel, deliberately avoiding technology as it is seen as threatening, and the “Goldens” are viewed with hostility. Christie journeys across the landscape, enduring much hardship and attempts on her life. I enjoyed the detailed worldbuilding – there are vivid descriptions of flora and fauna, something of the Orthean language, and lots of little details that make the world feel alien, such as the harsher sunlight from a hotter sun. A novel I will definitely re-read and now a favorite.(Sadly, Mary Gentle does not seem to have an Internet presence at all, though she was born in 1956 and is apparently still alive.) (3/3/2017 Journal)

The sequel, Ancient Light, is … not happy, though still a compelling read. It essentially sees Orthean society disintegrate and collapse under civil war. Christie returns, but is now a representative of a multinational company, PanOceania, that wants to exploit the Golden Witchbreed technology – a prestigious position she has mixed emotions about. As has happened many times on Earth when a high-tech society encounters a low-tech one, the result is destructive for the latter (similar events occurred in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, when high-tech visitors from Earth encountered the natives there). The ending is not neat and tidy but implies an uncertain future (which left quite a few readers unhappy).

I have compiled the Appendices from both novels for ease of reference.

Ash: A Secret History

I am only a little way into this (as of 4/4/2018) and, as with the author's Orthe series, am loving it! A truly original fantasy/alternative history, unlike most of the generic rubbish published today, with a rough but likeable female protagonist, an orphaned mercenary with white hair and pointed ears who is analogous to Joan of Arc. It does not spare the reader from the grubbiness and bloodiness of medieval life and fighting. There is a subtle touch of magic in this alternative Earth. (I fortuitously found a copy in a charity shop - most of Mary Gentle's early books are sadly out of print.)

David Goyer

Heaven’s Shadow

I finished the book I ordered, Heaven’s Shadow. Somewhat annoyingly, it is the first of a trilogy, though this seems to be the trend these days, presumably to make more money. The book was a reasonably entertaining read, though the characters were a little caricaturish and clichéd at times, mainly in the way they spoke (lots of U.S.-centric slang – is that the way people speak in reality?). There were some interesting ideas, which is a major purpose of science fiction (in my view). An unexpected plot point involved the Akashic Records – where all consciousness and thoughts of living beings are stored in the fabric of the Universe, and the technology of the aliens (who are not encountered in the first novel) can access this to resurrect the minds and bodies of dead people; some of the characters in the book lived again via this method. Below are some extracts explaining this (spoilers if you haven’t read it):

“There is, in my tradition, a version of what might be happening here. The Vedas, our sacred Sanskrit texts, mention the akashic records – a library of all human experience. What if that exists? What if the universe is nothing more than a giant akashic record … and these aliens somehow access it.”

There was so much more … concepts that lurked at the borders of memory, like lessons in computer science studied twenty years back: the idea that entities, organic or not, had a greater footprint in the universe than suggested by visual borders or physical limits, that they left quantum “wakes” or “clouds” that could be detected – and manipulated – years after death or destruction.

“Oh, we’ve got a model for your Revenants and such. The idea is, just as there is no true physical separation between your body and the universe – even when your core organism ceases to function, there are still atoms of moisture and skin and exhalation that linger, float off, whatever – the same thing applies to your mind, your soul, your life force. There is also some kind of physical connection between the electrical field that is you, Harley Drake, and the universe.

“Your carrier might be shut off. That is, you die. But the information lingers … like cloud computing, it’s all around us … accessible.”

“So our souls are some new kind of matter, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s one way to look at it. I mean, hell, the universe is largely made up of dark matter and energy, and we still don’t have a terrific handle on what that is or does. Why not some other kind of energy or information? It’s probably affected by gravity, too. The cloud of souls travels with the Sun.”

“Sounds like the opening line of your next novel.”

“Those days are gone, my friend. But the image is elegant, is it not?” He let the contents of the bottle slosh. “Everything that ever lived on Earth – or in the solar system – is still with us, in some fashion. It’s all information … the folks who built Keanu just know how to access it and repackage it.”

“They must have a pretty impressive search engine to pull Zack Stewart’s wife out of a library like that.”

“We suspect they got some clues or information from the arriving astronauts. We think the, ah, markers help. Scanned them, I think. Then they’re retrieved the same way the National Security Agency plucks a single cell phone conversation out of an entire city’s signals. Random frequency tracking, amped up a bit.”

“Yeah, a bit,” Harley said. “Then, of course, there’s the whole business of growing new bodies.”

“That’s just twenty-second-century Earth biotech, don’t you think? If we live long enough, we could have new carcasses, too.” Williams wheezed, tipped his bottle toward Harley. “We both could certainly use one.”

Megan Doyle Stewart was not at all sure she approved of her newly reborn state. Yes, she’d been given a second chance at life, but why? What for? She had gone almost directly from car crash in Florida to the Beehive on Keanu.

Yes, something of “Megan Stewart” had existed for those two years in between … bodiless, blind, deaf, a state that would have terrified the living Megan, taking her buried-alive fear to a horrific extreme.

Yet she hadn’t felt fear. Instead she had … well, soared, flown, skipped from memory to memory. She had become unstuck in time and space, recalling and reliving her first kiss with Sean Peerali and meeting Zack at that party in Berkeley and late nights editing and dragging her tricycle across Main Street ….

But whereas dreams were mixed-up, twisted replays of a day’s activities, these moments seemed real, a record of what she had seen and heard and felt at the time.

She had even experienced “memories” from different points of view … other people in those same scenes. And in at least one instance – that she could recall now; it might have been a dozen or a hundred – she lived a moment from some other person’s life altogether.

The more she thought about it, the more fascinating it was … right up to the inevitable instant when she realized that unless her luck changed radically, and soon, she was going to be right back in that … postlife environment, a matrix of memories, a file in some cloud computing system.

She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is … incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”

“You said we.”

“Yes, we. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel … he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”

“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”

“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.

Zack was about to seize on the term candidates – for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of … any race?”

“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”

“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”

“It was accessing data stored in … the closest I can come is morphogenetic fields. The universe is filled with it … with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”

“Like the akashic records from the Vedas, the ‘library’ of all experiences and memories of human minds through their physical lifetimes.”

“They’re not using those terms.”

“Neither am I, really. They were Taj’s.”

“And I keep thinking of Jung. I guess we all reach for the words and concepts we already know.” She smiled. “This is like trying to explain the Internet to Benjamin Franklin. You know electricity, but you’re a long way from computers and networks.”

Zack looked up at the Architect, who seemed almost indifferent to his presence. “I feel like I’m standing outside the biggest library in the world, only it’s closed.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Oh, God, honey, it’s not about you. It’s just … look at this!” He gestured at the Temple interior. “Okay, why did your friends send this vessel?”

“We’ve found a … presence, a challenge, another entity, and it’s been a threat to us. We came here looking for help. We think you might fill that role.”

“Against another race?”

“Another type of being, the Reivers.”

“The what? Sounds Irish.”

“I’m sure it’s Irish, Scots, Gaelic, whatever. It’s the word in my head, and it means bad guys. It’s not just that they’re enemies, they are enemies bent on exterminating us, and all memory of us. We can’t coexist.”

Zack took her by the shoulders. “But, still, it’s thousands of years in the past, hundreds of light-years from here, right? Does that threat still exist?”

“Yes. The Reivers don’t live on the same time scale humans do. They’ll be a threat for a million years.”

It’s an interesting alternative to the transhumanist idea of uploading one’s consciousness into a computer (which some believe won’t be biologically possible anyway, as mind and body are inextricably linked). You do get uploaded, but after death! And who would want to be stuck in an Earthly computer when you could have the whole Universe and other minds or essences to explore.

The Reivers sound a little like the Xul in Ian Douglas’s Galactic Marines saga; these were xenophobic aliens who had uploaded their minds into computers millions of years ago and wandered around the Galaxy in starships destroying any other intelligent life as a potential threat. (5/9/2011 Journal)

M. C. A. Hogarth

One author whom I have been following and reading for a few years is M.C.A. Hogarth (“MCAH”). She is an independently-published author whose stories are mainly science fiction and fantasy, involving aliens or human-animal hybrids. She has several worlds in which various novels are set; she is also a talented artist.

Kherishdar

My favorite of her worlds is Kherishdar, about aliens called the Ai-Naidar and the society they live in. It is an ordered and structured society benignly ruled by a long-lived Emperor, with Castes. There is an emphasis on collectivism over the individual. There are three books written so far: two “chapbooks” (collections of flash fiction) and one full-length novel. I find the world calming and restful, though many other readers strongly dislike the society because of the collective aspect.

For the Ai-Naidar, caste and tradition are not the shackles that imprison the spirit but the silences that make sense of the music of their lives. The Aphorisms of Kherishdar collects 25 short tales about what it is to have an Ai-Naidari soul: to find comfort in tradition, law and structure; to revere interdependence over individualism; to know one’s place … to always have one.

The stories are available online: The Aphorisms of Kherishdar, The Admonishments of Kherishdar, Black Blossom. (6/5/2017 Journal)

She also began a new story serial, Kherishdar’s Exception, in 2016.

Jokka

The Jokka are another of her alien species I found appealing; they somewhat resemble bipedal horses. The Jokka have three sexes (male, female, neuter) and their society is in a state of decline. There are several short stories and three full-length novels. The stories are more difficult in places than that of Kherishdar; harsher and more tragic. They are still an evocative depiction of an alien society.

The Pelted

I have read a couple of her Pelted universe novels, featuring the Eldritch (genetically-altered humans, the equivalent of “Space Elves.”

Earthrise is the first of the Her Instruments series (the ebook is a free download), one of the main protagonists being Reese Eddings and her spaceship crew of various Pelted. An enjoyable and engrossing read, as the initially tense and unhappy Reese gradually is able to overcome her psychological issues and bond more closely with the rest of her crew, and there is a tentative beginning of a relationship with the Eldritch crewman.

The Princes’ Game series is a darker and, at times, quite brutal series. An Eldritch ambassador must try to survive in the court of vicious dragonlike aliens called the Chatcaava; others who went before him have done badly. He does so but at great personal cost. To date I have read the first book; it is compelling and exhausting at times. (31/5/2017 Journal)

4/11/2019 update: I have lost interest in most of her writing now, though I still like the Kherishdar world.

Zoltan Istvan

The Transhumanist Wager is a novel by a transhumanist advocate and Libertarian – “he wants it to become the Atlas Shrugged of transhumanism.” (“Becoming Machines Is Part of Our Destiny,” Says Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan) I had mixed feelings regarding the story and, more pointedly, the philosophy being promoted by the novel and its protagonist.

The story itself was not too badly written; I did feel interest in what would happen next and read the whole novel. The main character, Jethro Knights, is on a quest for immortality and will let nothing stand in his way – for me, the title of the notorious Nazi movie Triumph of the Will seems all-too-appropriate here, both for the character and his philosophy, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. He is determined to change the world to suit his view – “To create the new, one must destroy the old” seems to be his motto – and that he certainly does, such as in a chapter where the Transhumanists destroy historical and religious monuments, to the understandable horror of most people.

Chapter 33 also has a long and rather tedious speech by Jethro espousing his views. The philosophy – a blend of transhumanism (“improving” humanity via various forms of technological enhancements) and Libertarianism (emphasizing individualism and selfishness over collectivism and government) – I found repugnant, as presented and promoted in the novel. There is no compassion or place for the so-called weak or those deemed “useless,” so no welfare or charity in a Libertarian transhuman society. To me it seems only a few steps away from the eugenics policies of the Nazis.

The only likable character is Zoe Bach, the woman who becomes his wife; she at least had some compassion and a more open mind towards the more mystical aspects of life. Unfortunately she does not last long. He actually felt affection for her, and pined after her, which gave him one redeeming characteristic.

G. S. Jennsen

In March 2019 I finished the first three novels in the science fiction Aurora Rhapsody series – the Aurora Rising sequence – by G. S. Jennsen. It follows the adventures of various individuals and their uncovering of a vast conspiracy where aliens from another dimension – who have been observing humanity for aeons – enter our universe via a dimensional portal and seek to destroy us as they perceive us as a threat. One of the aliens is sympathetic towards humanity, however, and aids and advises two of the main characters (Alex Solovy and Caleb Marano, who become lovers). A massive battle ensues, and the aliens are driven back through the portal.

There are six more books in the series (three in Aurora Renegades and the final three in Aurora Resonant (there is a Synopsis at her website). The first three were a decent read, with likeable characters (though a lot of them to keep track of), “magical” advanced technology that is standard in most sci-fi these days, such as sapient Artificial Intelligences and Faster-than-Light travel, in the form of a “sLume drive” (superluminal drive) – a version of the Alcubierre warp drive. They do feel very “tropey” though, in that every cliché from various sci-fi games has been engaged.

I would not thus describe the novels as “hard” sci-fi, though, as that problem of FTL travel also implying time travel is ignored (as a lot of such authors do, probably out of lack of awareness as most are not physicists with degrees). From that blog entry I linked to:

If you allow faster-than-light (FTL), then you break causality: you are allowing time-travel. One pithy way of saying this is:

Pick two:

The Universe has picked relativity and causality, it seems. Thus, we cannot travel or communicate faster than light.

There is also FTL communication, in the form of quantum entanglement:

By Monday morning on the planet Atlantis (which for added fun was around three in the morning in Seattle) all his assets would be in place, and everything they saw, touched and interacted with fed to his office via an instantaneous quantum entanglement communication network.

– Starshine, Chapter 6

In reality this is impossible, again due to causality issues. From the linked blog entry:

I could, for example, create pairs of entangled photons in different particular quantum states. One state could represent a 1, and the other a 0. All my distant colleague needs to do is determine which quantum state a particular pair is in. But to do this my colleague would need to make lots of copies of a quantum state, then make measurements of these copies in order to determine statistically the state of the original. But it turns out you can’t make a copy of a quantum system without knowing the state of the quantum system. This is known as the no-cloning theorem, and it means entangled systems can’t transmit messages faster than light.

Affinity Konar

Mischling is a novel about twin girls who are sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 and are experimented upon by the evil Josef Mengele. The novel is different in that it is not a straightforward account but is written in a very “literary,” stream-of-consciousness, almost dreamlike (or perhaps, given the setting, nightmarish) style, with alternating viewpoints from the twins Pearl and Stasha. They understandably retreat into their own private world as a means of surviving their horrendous conditions and treatment, and reality and imaginings merge in places. I found the novel and its writing style peculiarly compelling, though it tends to polarize reviewers (some like it, others see it as pretentious and overly “flowery”).

Louis L’Amor

I am reading Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amor. I read it as a teenager when it was originally published

– 987) and not since then, and it has held up well. A straightforward but well-told survival adventure set during the Cold War (when Soviet Russia was a mysterious and powerful enemy, in contrast to it now!) where an American pilot of Native American (part Sioux, part Cheyenne) and Scottish ancestry has been taken prisoner and is being held in a remote Siberian prison. He escapes, but must endure the harsh Siberian winter, evade capture and his nemesis, the ruthless Yakut tracker Alekhin. (8/11/2020 Journal entr

I managed to finish Last of the Breed; still a great read and I would strongly recommend it! The fate of Joe Mack is left to the reader’s imagination – did he manage to cross the Bering Strait via kayak and meet up with the woman who also escaped and who fell in love with him? He becomes more and more in tune with his Native American heritage, thinking and living like they did in their traditional lifestyle. There is much wisdom in the writing and in my view the novel is far superior to many thrillers written today

– nd refreshingly free of the politically-correct “cultural appropriation” controversy nonsense that many writers feel inhibited by now). (19/11/2020 Journal entry

Eric Van Lustbader

Pearl Saga series

I read the first of the three books in the series, The Ring of Five Dragons, in December 2016 (27/12/2016 Journal). It is a mixture of fantasy with a little science fiction. The descriptions are lush and evocative, and worldbuilding is richly detailed. I like the way he involves women; some are heroes and some villains, but they are not just side characters to the men. One of the major characters has both a male and female dwelling in the same female body (done via magic). Sadly the series is incomplete, and the author is currently involved with writing Jason Bourne thrillers, and it does not look as if he will return to the world anytime soon. (I did send him a tweet saying I was liking the series.)

I completed the second novel, The Veil of a Thousand Tears, in February 2017 (4/2/2017 Journal). It continues the rich worldbuilding and adventures and trials of various characters. I find myself wanting to know what happens to them, and caring about them.

For convenience, I have copied his behind-the-scenes notes here.

S.D. McKee

Defeated: Darkness Among the Stars

The novel was not badly written, though the author did, to quote one reviewer, “misuse words and abuse his thesaurus.” As it was published in 2005 and no sequel has appeared, it evidently was not a bestseller.

My main disappointment – and spoilers follow – was that the aliens who appeared in the web excerpts were in fact humans! He used the clichéd trope of humans evolving from higher beings who came to Earth (Ancient Astronauts). I find that a cop-out and an unnecessary elaboration as there is no evidence that humans evolved anywhere else but Earth, seeing as our DNA has a common ancestry with all other life here. The alien-humans also have psychic powers, another disliked trope of mine as there is no scientific evidence for these. The main human protagonist gets something of a makeover and is turned into one of the alien humans, gaining their superpowers and is also their Chosen One. (A plot point I found a little racially dubious was that the alien-humans were all white-skinned, and one of the dark-skinned human spaceship crew who also got a makeover had his skin and hair turned white.)

So the novel was a mildly entertaining read with some interesting ideas, but I don’t know if I would buy the sequel (if it ever appears). (25/11/2010 Journal)

Elyne Mitchell

The Silver Brumby horse stories by Elyne Mitchell were some of my favorites during my horse-obsessed phase in my late childhood and early teens (late 1970s-early 1980s). The original The Silver Brumby was published in 1958, but it is one of those books that is timeless. The series is set in Australia’s High Country, in the Australian Alps around the Victorian-New South Wales border – in the vicinity of Mount Kosciuszko and Snowy Mountains – and feature the near-mythical Silver Brumby, Thowra, and the adventures of his clan. The Australian landscape is beautifully evoked in her writing, and there is a strong mystical quality around the novels. They are still wonderful to read as an adult, which cannot be said of a lot of children’s books, and I would highly recommend them over much of the dumbed-down rubbish that is published for children today.

An aspect of the stories that I like is that Man is the enemy and the horses do their utmost to avoid or escape capture, and thus being tamed and “broken” (unlike other classic series such as The Black Stallion or My Friend Flicka).

Some links: Elyne Mitchell at Wikipedia, and a fan site giving details of the books (at Archive.org). “The Woman from Snowy River,” The Age article from 2012 on the centenary of Elyne’s birth. Sadly she passed away in 2002, but left a wonderful legacy.

Brumbies are themselves an introduced species, regarded as a feral pest by many, and they are culled on occasions, which is a controversial policy. (“Shooting brumbies in Kosciuszko,” ABC News, 1/4/2014; Save the Brumbies website.)

Journal mentions: 17/9/2007; 16/12/2012; 13/4/2013.

Victor Pelevin

Omon Ra

A variation on my favorite fictional trope of a generation starship that I find curiously appealing, perhaps because it is confined and even cozy, is the faked generation starship voyage: where a group of people think they are on a real interplanetary or interstellar voyage but are instead, unknown to them, confined in some underground chamber. An example of this is in the novel Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin […].

In Omon Ra, the titular character ultimately finds out that the Soviet space program he has been enrolled in is an elaborate fake (similar to the “faked Moon landings” conspiracy theory, but for real in the novel). I first read this short novel in the early 2000s and found it compelling; almost dreamlike.

At first I thought I must be in some huge ancient Roman planetarium. On an immensely high vaulted ceiling, set among glass and tin, the distant stars glimmered at about one-third of full voltage. About forty metres from the wardrobe stood an old crane; attached to its lifting arm, about four metres above the ground, was a Salyut spacecraft, shaped like a huge bottle. Docked with the Salyut was an Agdam T-3 cargo shuttle; the spaceship sat on the lifting arm the way a plastic model aeroplane sits on its stand. The entire structure was obviously too heavy for the crane to support, because the stern of the cargo shuttle was supported by a couple of long beams braced against the floor; I could just make them out in the half-light, but when two floodlights came on right beside the wardrobe, they became almost invisible because, like the wall behind them, they were painted black and covered with pieces of glittering foil that reflected the electric light.

The floodlights were fitted with filters, and their light was a strange, deathly white. Apart from the spaceship, which immediately looked very convincing, they also lit up a television camera and two machine-gunners who were smoking beside it, and a long table with microphones, food, and spectrally transparent bottles of vodka looking like icicles that had been hammered through the table; sitting at the table were two generals. At one side stood a table with a microphone, at which a man in civilian clothes was sitting. Behind him was a large sheet of plywood with the word “News” and a drawing of the earth; rising crookedly over the earth was a five-pointed star with long, extended side rays. Another civilian was leaning over the table and talking to the man behind the microphone.

“Double three!”

I didn’t see who said that. The second civilian ran over to the camera and pointed it towards the small table. A bell rang, and the man at the microphone began to speak:

“Today we are at the front line of Soviet space science, in one of the branches of Central Flight Control. Cosmonauts Armen Vezirov and Djambul Mezhelaitis are now in their seventh year on board an orbital spacecraft. This is the longest space flight in history, and it has put our country at the forefront of world space technology. It is symbolic that I should be here with cameraman Nikolai Gordienko on the very day when the cosmonauts are carrying out an important scientific assignment – in exactly thirty seconds they will emerge from their craft into open space in order to install the Quantum astrophysics module.”

The entire space was suddenly illuminated by a soft, diffused light – I raised my head and saw that the lamps on the ceiling had been turned up to full voltage, revealing a magnificent panorama of the starry sky to which man has aspired for so many centuries, the inspiration for those beautiful but naïve legends about silver nails driven into the firmament.

(10/3/2022 Journal)

I finished it and still found it curiously compelling and enjoyable; it has re-read value (which can’t be said of most longer novels). As well as the almost-cozy feeling of the enclosed fake spaceship environment I quoted in that previous entry, there are also lots of little details about Soviet-era life, written with mixed emotions of nostalgia and disillusionment; a contrast of the dreariness of everyday life with the childhood dream of becoming a cosmonaut:

All the same, the person that I could with real certainty call myself took shape only later, and gradually. I think the first glimpse of my true personality was the moment when I realised I could aspire beyond the thin blue film of the sky into the black abyss of space. It happened the same winter, one evening when I was strolling around the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in another corner of Moscow. I was walking along a dark and empty snow-covered alley; suddenly on my left I heard this droning, like a huge telephone ringing. I turned – and saw him.

Sitting there in empty space, leaning back as though in an armchair, he was slowly drifting forwards, and the tubes behind him were straightening out at the same slow pace. The glass of his helmet was black, and the only bright spot on it was a triangular highlight, but I knew he could see me. He could have been dead for centuries. His arms were stretched out confidently towards the stars, and his legs were so obviously not in need of any support that I realised once and for ever that only weightlessness could give man genuine freedom – which, incidentally, is why all my life I’ve only been bored by all those Western radio voices and those books by various Solzhenitsyns. In my heart, of course, I loathed a state whose silent menace obliged every group of people who came together, even if only for a few seconds, to imitate zealously the vilest and bawdiest individual among them; but since I realised that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space and was not much interested in what was happening on earth.

What I saw in front of me was simply a spotlit mosaic on the wall of an exhibition pavilion, a picture of a cosmonaut in open space, but it told me more in an instant than the dozens of books I’d read before that day.

Although described as amusing, I found the story rather wistful. (4/5/2022 Journal)

Kalani Pickhart

A pro-Ukrainian propaganda literary attempt. Relevant Journal entries: 10/10/2022, 26/10/2022

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Footfall

An alien invasion novel by the two well-known sci-fi authors (Jerry Pournelle sadly passed away in 2017), written back in 1985 during the Cold War between the USA and Soviet Union. Despite being a product of its time in this and other respects, this is still a riveting read, and a fairly realistic depiction of an attempted invasion by aliens – the Fithp – from a planet around Alpha Centauri seeking to colonize Earth. The aliens have a strong resemblance to “baby elephants” with manipulative trunks that branch into two segments, then 4 tentacles on each (their numeral system is Base-8). They get a good amount of scenes, establishing the different ways they think compared to humans (the Fithp are herd animals) and the misinterpretations between species that ensues. The humans at first find the Fithps’ physical appearance amusing, but this is soon replaced with fear and anger as the aliens bombard Earth with kinetic weapons (captured asteroids) in a “shock and awe” campaign; also to ready it for colonization. There is no “magic” technology; the aliens have come on a long journey on a Generation Ship, some of the herd spending the time in hibernation, and the technology depicted is within feasability. My only quibble that there is no glossary of Fithp terms!

TV Tropes page; relevant spaceship section at Atomic Rockets; book covers at the ISFDB.

K. Arsenault Rivera

The Tiger’s Daughter is the first novel by her in a fantasy series. It is set in a land that is influenced by ancient Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian cultures (the dominant Hokkaran empire and nomadic Qorin, respectively). The story focuses on two warrior women, O-Shizuka, empress of the Hokkaran and Barsalayaa Shefali of the Qorin, and the relationship between them as they battle “black blood” demons that threaten the empire. The novel is written as a series of corresponding letters from Barsalayaa to O-Shizuka, in second person (“you”), a not-common perspective. For me it was a slow, dense, lush read, very different from the usual fantasy novels, and I enjoyed it very much. The flowery writing style seems to polarize reviewers; for me it is something to luxuriate in and read and re-read. On another note, I have little patience with the “cultural appropriation” complaints from some other reviewers; it is a fantasy story after all, and I hope the author is not discouraged by such sniping and nitpicking.

The first four chapters can be read at Tor Books website.

Dick Roughsey

The Rainbow Serpent

I remember ordering this via the Australian version of the Scholastic Books program at my school; I think I was attracted by the cover. Sadly it vanished long ago, like the rest of my books from childhood. It has remained in my memory and I was delighted to see it in a bookshop again, thankfully unchanged. The paintings are gorgeous, done in a sort of folk art or naïve style along with elements of traditional Aboriginal art. The colors are of the Australian outback (ochre land, turquoise sky) along with stark black stylized trees and Aboriginal people. The story myth is short but still compelling. The serpent himself is black, overlain with an iridescent rainbow pattern. (1/5/2017 Journal)

Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow and Children of God

This duology of First Contact between humans and aliens is one of my all-time favorites. In the first novel a Jesuit priest, Emilio Sandoz, accompanies a privately-funded (by the Jesuits) expedition to the Alpha Centauri star system after radio signals are detected emanating from a habitable planet there. First Contact is made with two sapient species – one the herbivore prey of the predatory other – but the initial euphoria turns to terror as the mission goes awry, and Emilio undergoes a brutal ordeal. The second novel follows up with some surviving characters and a new Jesuit-funded mission to Rakhat is launched with a new crew. The society of the native aliens has been hugely disrupted after the first mission, and catastrophe results for one of the alien species.

I first read The Sparrow in the early 1990s and what happened to Emilio’s hands stayed in my memory. I have recently re-read both books; they are one of the few that can stand up to multiple re-reads.

A huge amount of analysis and commentary has been made about the novels, so I won’t add to this. I am primarily interested in the worldbuilding and depiction of alien species, which I thought was very realistic. I have created a page with some descriptions taken from the novels.

Lisa See

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

I found the story quite compelling in its depiction of the closed-in traditional world of Chinese village women of that time; one that is intensely physically and mentally inwardly-focused rather than outward to the wider world. Women had very restricted lives and were considered worthless (not to mention being forced to endure the extreme unpleasantness of footbinding, graphically described), but still managed to have a rich inner life and friendships. (The author has a page on the writing of the novel.)

The narrator of the story was also presented differently in that she was not the usual woman rebelling against the system who is a stock character in most female-orientated stories these days, but one who is determined to continue her traditions despite the pain they cause her.

Perhaps it resonated because I am older, family is more important to me (though I am still reclusive) and the women being shut away in a room has a little similarity to my situation (I am something of a hikkomori); I have also long been more inward-focused on my internal fantasy life. I have no close female friends my age, something I do wish for at times. (25/2/2016 Journal)

Adrian Tchaikovsky

In September 2019 I read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the first in a science fiction series (the second, Children of Ruin, was released this year and which I also read – see below). I generally enjoyed it, and it had a lot of interesting ideas (as sci-fi should). An Earthlike world 20 light-years from Earth is terraformed by a human-built starship in preparation for later colonization, as are many others. It is to be “seeded” with a nanovirus that will evolve (“uplift”) the lifeforms transported there from Earth into sapient beings intended as aides for the future colonists. However, ecological terrorists sabotage and destroy the starship, though not before the virus is released along with some Earth lifeforms. The intended monkeys are destroyed in their capsule upon descent, but spiders instead are infected with the virus, and develop sapience over generations. Another starship with colonists arrives two thousand years later, after the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by war. The colonists must then interact with the resident spiders.

I was quite pleased to see that no “magic” faster-than-light travel was employed; instead the science is kept reasonably realistic, if advanced: extended hibernation for the human colonists, ark ships, genetic engineering via a specially-created virus. The timescale is thus necessarily very long, but that is unavoidable when using realistic physics.

I also liked the spiders, despite being a bit arachnophobic! I could even come to like real spiders (my favorites are the cute and colorful Peacock Spiders, extensively photographed by Jurgen Otto). The fictional ones were depicted quite well, being relatable despite having alien psychologies.

Children of Ruin follows on from Children of Time, not with spiders (though a couple of spider characters from the first novel were featured) but with uplifted octopuses (which are also cute). Not quite as riveting as the first book, and I was a bit disappointed to read that what appeared to be an Alcubierre warp drive is invented by the octopuses at the very end of the novel:

The science faction are going to test the Noah device, now repaired and improved. That they feel the need to take it outside the orbit of either Damascus or Nod in order to deploy it is unsettling, but Helena and Portia want to see, finding themselves in quarters very like their previous incarceration on the rescue mission.

The device itself is surprisingly small, an overarching framework fit around a single, unmanned sphere-ship, far enough out that Helena must take it on faith and instrumentation that it is there at all.

She doesn’t understand the full science behind the thing, only what it is supposed to do. She doesn’t really believe that, either. The octopuses are erratic engineers, after all, plagued by factionalism and short attention spans. It’s all impossible, isn’t it? And true, Old Empire humans conceived of such a loophole in the universe, but even for them the energy requirements were ludicrously out of reach. Generations of octopus scientists have been tantalized by the thought, though, and have desired to make it real, subconsciously telling their Reaches, Find a way, cheating physics, paring away at the problem until … this. And still she does not believe it, and her scepticism is tiny compared to Portia’s. […]

When they test Noah’s device, it vanishes instantly. The octopus scientists are split, some hailing this as a success, some as a failure. Their instruments are ambivalent as to what happened because their instruments cannot yet test the principles that they are deploying, a common problem given the leap-of-inspiration nature of cephalopod science.

A year later, however, the signal will reach them from a light year out in the void. The device arrived successfully, having manipulated the expansion rates of the space immediately before and behind it to travel the distance in a matter of subjective hours. No return trip had been planned, however, and the actual signal will be forced to travel the old-fashioned way, under the stern eye of a relativity that does not even realize it has been tricked.

This is what I find dismaying about other sci-fi book series I have read, such as the Coyote Universe series by Allen Steele, and some of The Expanse TV series and novels: they begin with reasonably realistic physics, but sooner or later introduce Faster-Than-Light technology and travel, which means the stories instantly become science fantasy. In my view now, introducing FTL is “cheating.”

Brad Thor

Dead Fall was his contribution to pro-Ukrainian propaganda. Given my utter despisal of the place (and my support of Russia), I found it a struggle to plow through this, but I managed. Relevant Journal entries for Dead Fall: 12/2/2023; 11/6/2023; 25/7/2023; 1/8/2023; 24/8/2023. Journal opinions on previous novels: 28/9/2022.

Karen Traviss

Wess’har Wars series

I read a novel I did like (first of a 6-part series): City of Pearl by Karen Traviss. I like it for the same reason that those who gave negative reviews at Amazon.com didn’t: the “strong ecological agenda” and the main female character sympathizing with the aliens. It’s also much more morally complex. There is an interesting interview with her at Strange Horizons. (2/6/2008 Journal)

I slogged my way through books 2 to 5 of Karen Traviss’s Wess’har series. After the first book, City of Pearl, which was quite good, I got increasingly weary of the main character, Shan Frankland, who was becoming perilously close to a Mary Sue-type character (a self-insert whom all the book’s characters like, and who can do no wrong). I also tend to react to aggressive female characters with hostility (and dislike female characters generally – the characters I create are usually solitary males). One reason for this dislike would be the memory of some unpleasant girls whom I encountered when at school. Girls – particularly teenage girls – can be extremely bitchy and vicious towards each other in a non-physical way that boys aren’t. (8/7/2008 Journal)

Harry Turtledove

Worldwar series

World War 2 is interrupted by an alien invasion and colonization, and history deviates from our timeline from then on. The aliens, reptilians who call themselves “The Race,” are depicted in as much detail as the human characters and are not there just as targets to be shot at. I have little interest in World War 2, and am more interested in the alien scenes. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, which is not a feature I enjoy (I prefer a narrower focus on a few characters). The writing style has been criticized as repetitive, but I don’t mind this at all. I have already read the last in the series (Homeward Bound, where humans visit The Race’s Homeworld) and have started the first of the original series. (4/2/2017 Journal)

Jack Vance

Planet of Adventure

This is a compilation of 4 books in the series: City of the Chasch, Servants of the Wankh, The Dirdir, The Pnume. I vaguely remember reading through these when young in the 1970s as Dad had some science fiction novels lying around that included these. The imagery remained in my imagination for years, but I did not get around to reading them until 2017.

The main human character is a pilot, Adam Reith, who needs to find his way back to Earth after the rest of his spaceship’s crew are killed when a missile shoots it down in orbit. They have come from Earth to investigate a distress signal sent 212 years ago from the planet Tschai that orbits the star Carina 4269. There are four main alien species co-existing on the planet (rather hostilely) as well as humans who were abducted long ago and who were modified to take on some characteristics of the alien race who are their masters (thus there are alien Pnume and human Pnumekin, Chasch and Chaschmen, Dirdir and Dirdirmen, and Wankh and Wankhmen). Adam has various adventures and sometimes-hostile encounters with the planet’s inhabitants as he looks for a means of acquiring another spaceship to go home.

The society is baroque and very old, and this is reflected in the the evocative descriptions of the planet’s landscapes. Its sun is of a weaker magnitude than Earth’s, and its light is a dimmer amber-gold.

The planet below broadened under their view: a world dimmer and darker than Earth, bathed in tawny golden light. They now could see continents and oceans, clouds, storms: the landscape of a mature world.

The ground was fifty feet below. The sunlight, as he had noted before, seemed rather more dim and yellow than the sunlight of Earth, and the shadows held an amber overtone. The air was aromatic with the scent of unfamiliar resins and oils; he was caught in a tree with glossy black limbs and brittle black foliage which made a rattling sound when he moved. (City of the Chasch Chapter 1)

Raising up on his elbow once more, Reith saw that the two moons, of equal apparent diameter, one pink, the other pale blue, had appeared in the east.

The sun sank behind a bank of graphite-purple clouds; sunset was an angry welter of crimson and brown. (City of the Chasch Chapter 2)

Low mist hung in wisps and drifts; the small noises of the caravan only seemed to accentuate the vast silence of the steppe. Color was forgotten; there was only the slate of the sky, drab gray-brown of steppe, watered milk of the mist.

He reached the gap and paused to rest, then set off once more, descending toward a forested upland, indistinct in the inkblue light of Braz. The trees were wonderful and strange, with trunks of glimmering white rising as spirals, winding round and round, sometimes engaging the spirals of near trees. The foliage was tattered black floss, and each tree terminated in a rough pitted ball, vaguely luminescent.

From the forest came sounds: croaks, groans laden with such human woe that Reith paused often in his stride, hand in his pouch on the comforting shape of his energy cell.

Braz sank into the forest; wisps of foliage glinted, zones of shimmer moved through the trees to keep pace as Reith passed. (City of the Chasch Chapter 5)

Peter Watts

I first read Peter Watts’ work in 2018 and he has since become one of my favorite authors. He does hard and difficult science-fiction, with psychologically-damaged characters as protagonists. He has written the “Blindopraxia” world set in our solar system, featuring genetically-engineered vampires, as well as his first novels, the Rifters trilogy set in the ocean, and the Sunflowers novellas set in the future, where a starship constructs wormholes as gateways for humanity on an endless voyage around the Milky Way. Also numerous short stories. Some of his stories can be downloaded in the Backlist section of his website.

I have just read Peter Watts’ latest novella, The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It is typical sci-fi in that it has interesting ideas and technology – in this case a black-hole-powered starship whose crew hibernates for thousands of years in between constructing wormhold stargates as it travels around the galaxy. But his tone is one of cynical nihilism and his characters use a lot of collaquisms and swear a lot, which for me at least gets wearying. His most well-known novel is Blindsight (available on his website), featuring genetically-engineered vampires meeting a very alien intelligence in the outer reaches of the Solar System, which I am trying to read, but it is in the same bleak style. (5/6/2018 entry)

I am actually liking his writing now; it is intelligent if sometimes difficult. I have read

– ell, listened to) his most well-known novel Blindsight and now to its sequel, Echopraxia (I will have to read them properly again). (5/8/2018 entry

More Journal entries mentioning him: 4/10/2018, 29/10/2018, 11/11/2018. I even attempted some fan art featuring my favorite Blindsight character, vampire Jukka Sarasti (done in the vector program Inkscape).

Brittany M. Willows

The Calypsis Project

Two books in the Echo-Alpha science fiction duology: The Calypsis Project, and The Calypsis Project: Rebirth. The author is quite young (born 1994); the first book published when she was 19. They are better-written than many older independent authors! They are strongly influenced by the Halo video game series (I created a table with what I saw as similar plot points), but have their own original plot and characters, so if you like the Halo novels you will enjoy the story of these ones also. A hostile first contact encounter between the United Nations Planetary Defense and the Drocain Empire (a coalition of reptilian-like aliens) leads to a years-long interplanetary war. Two of the main characters, human Corporal Alana Carmen and Drakhori Kenon Valinquint, will find they both have a destiny that will affect the war and galaxy. I did find the space marine characters somewhat irritating (predictably clichéd in their behavior), but that comes from my dislike of that trope. (Read in 2016)

Sunday, 15 June 2025 at 2:51:38 pm