I am reviving these little book blurbs, because I need something to hold myself accountable to my intention to read more and read faster...
by Tim Maughan, 2019
In the near future, the Internet goes down. Suddenly, completely and permanently.
That’s the premise in a nutshell of this near-future novel. The motivations of the people behind this deliberate attack are treated with some sympathy, but at the same time, the consequences are clearly portrayed as disastrous and tragic, as the global economy collapses and lives and relationships are torn asunder.
The narrative effectively brings home the effects of this global event by focusing on the local. Most of the story takes place in English city of Bristol, several years after the Internet’s destruction. (There are also flashbacks to New York City in the “before” times, where we see how the increasing online-ization of life is making the lives of people on the margins of mainstream society so much more difficult.)
The very local setting is what I may end up remembering most about “Infinite Detail”. Post-collapse Bristol is described in sufficient detail that, if I ever find myself in the city with time to spare, I could easily spend a day on a “Places of ‘Infinite Detail’” tour. I know next to nothing about the city, but by reading about its post-collapse state as described in the novel I feel as if I’ve learned something about the urban culture that exists there now.
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss, 2007
Possibly the most famous fantasy novel yet published in the twenty-first century, The Name of the Wind is the first part of the life story of the omnicompetent Kvothe, a man who now wants to live a quiet life despite the fact that he has become a legend across his faux-European-medieval continent.
To be honest, my big problem with this going in was that I knew it’s technically the first book in a trilogy, whose second volume appeared in 2010 and whose third still hasn’t made an appearance, which is the kind of thing that really puts me off a series. But, impressed by the book’s fame, I decided I would mentally pretend it’s a singleton.
Rothfuss is a skilled writer, I’ll give him that. Faux-European-medieval settings honestly don’t excite me much anymore, and our hero is way too much of a larger-than-life, good-at-everything-he-puts-his-mind-to fantasy figure, but the prose drew me in and I enjoyed this world and its logical, carefully-worked-out system of magic. At its end, the story is obviously only about a third of the way through, but I felt sated. (I will pick up the second book only when the third book has appeared in this world.)
Numbercaste
by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, 2017
It is the very near future, and the quantification of our lives has reached its logical conclusion: we all have a Number, an algorithmically generated figure that represents our cumulative worth to society. Explicitly inspired by the Chinese social credit system, one’s Number is both an incentive to do good in society and a reward for having done good.
The novel is written as a tell-all memoir about larger-than-life Number mastermind Julius Common, from the perspective of his associate, the down-to-earth Patrick Udo. Udo’s narration uses spare prose that centers the near-future setting and the epic entrepreneurial figure of Common. NumberCorp uses questionable ethics as they bully skeptical governments into letting them become entrenched throughout the world.
Befitting the truly global nature of the Number enterprise, the non-Western world is put front and center, including but not limited to the author’s native Sri Lanka. It’s an unambiguously good thing that, more and more, non-Western locales are being centered in English-language SF without being exoticized or otherwise reduced to local color.
A Memory Called Empire
by Arkady Martine, 2019
The interstellar Teixcalaanli Empire is militaristic and expansionist, a fact that the smaller nations on its periphery must constantly be hyper-aware of. Lsel Station, a small sovereign state that values its independence, is in a delicate geopolitical (galactic-political?) situation, made more complicated as their erratic Ambassador to Teixcalaan, Yskandr Aghavn, hasn’t returned home in fifteen years and no one knows what he’s been up to. When Teixcalaan informs Lsel without explanation that they require a new ambassador, young diplomat Mahit Dzmare gets a fifteen-year-old copy of Yskandr’s mind installed in her head -- not the ideal plan, but one must make do with what one has -- and departs for the Teixcalaanli imperial court.
Mahit has spent her life studying Teixcalaanli language and culture in the classroom, but actually landing on the Imperial capital planet (a world-spanning city in the Trantor/Coruscant style) makes her feel like an uncultured foreigner. Her Yskandr-copy is unexpectedly unreliable, and interstellar communication is not speedy (Lsel and Teixcalaan seem to have very little awareness of each other’s current affairs), so Mahit is on her own and must figure out quickly who her potential allies are. On top of all this, the Teixcalaanli imperial court is in a particularly unstable period right now…
This is a sensitive and engaging work of science-fictional palace intrigue, occasionally reminiscent of Katherine Addison’s “The Goblin Emperor.” I’m a sucker for a very specific sort of worldbuilding where there’s neither a clear connection to our Earth nor any culture that’s supposed to be a sci-fi analogue to Westerners (Yoon Ha Lee is also great at this). As for the characterization, Mahit’s a sympathetic viewpoint character as she tries to both survive and accomplish her goals as a fish-out-of-water. The followup novel, A Desolation Called Peace, is out now and is on my reading list.
The Quarry
by Iain Banks, 2013
“The Quarry” was Iain Banks’ last novel; he died just as it was being published. It centers on a man named Guy and his teenage son Kit, who live in a rickety, soon-to-be-demolished house on the edge of a quarry. Guy has invited a group of old friends back to his home to reminisce about old days and hunt for a missing videotape that may contain something highly incriminating. He is dying of cancer, and the reader may morbidly wonder (as I certainly did) how much of the narrative had been completed when Banks received his own terminal diagnosis.
Like most of Banks’ books, I found it to be a very engaging page-turner, though this one was low-stakes and small-scale. Kit is the novel’s sole viewpoint character; I liked how Banks narrated the view from inside his head, as Kit is clearly on the autism spectrum and tends to consciously think through his social interactions in a way neurotypicals often don’t. Meanwhile, Guy spends his final weeks long-windedly bemoaning the rotten state of the world. In-universe, this is presented as unpleasant angry ranting, but as far as I can tell Guy’s rants are Banks’ actual opinions, and I had the thought that there’s little room for doubt what Banks would have thought of subsequent political developments had he lived (the book even works in some jabs at then-London mayor Boris Johnson).
My final observation is, as both The Quarry and Banks’ penultimate book, Stonemouth, contain references to the work of Seth MacFarlane, I have no choice but to conclude that the great Iain Banks, creator of the legendary Culture universe, probably watched Family Guy in his downtime, which for some reason I find very strange to imagine.
