Review: Dark State

Dark State by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Still really enjoying this series. I like (for values of like including "enjoy reading about" but definitely not including "hope to see some day") the elements of parallel-America-as-a-high-tech-police-state. And the elements of old-school coldwar-era spycraft. And the whole convoluted parallel-history Europe. And the stories of Rita and her birth-mother and her grandfather and them all meeting and being a bit screwed up but eventually coping, etc.

But.

(You knew there was a "but" in here somewhere, didn't you?)

I had some serious credulity problems with this book. I had to consciously will some of this suspension of disbelief, in order to get back to the stories that I was enjoying. A major plotline in this book is the defection of Princess Elizabeth, via world-walking agents. And, as near as I can tell, that entire plotline should have gone more or less like this:

Elizabeth wakes in the middle of the night, in her private room at the well-guarded boarding house where she lives. Did she hear a noise? Wait, what's this? A note on the bedspread? "If you truly mean to leave, come to the bathroom without saying a word, stand on the box and hold my hand. You will have the opportunity to discuss terms and return if they are not acceptable."
...
Elizabeth gasped to find herself standing on a scaffold in the midst of a forest. The shrouded figure who had somehow transported her here from her own bath-chamber spoke: "Here are the terms of our offer for asylum and citizenship; if you have specific requests I have limited ability to alter them, but know that our First Man has been briefed and agreed to these terms in advance. Please make your decision quickly; I can have you back in your room again without anyone knowing if you decide not to come, but the longer we take the more likely it becomes that your guards will notice."
...
"Yes," Elizabeth said, and the man smiled. "I hoped you'd say that," he said, and waved to a man at the base of the scaffold, who promptly disappeared. Before she could even comment on this, she was distracted by suddenly finding herself in shadow; looking up, she saw an enormous dirigible had appeared over her head. "Here's our ride," said the man...

---

Look, there is absolutely no reason given in the book (that I caught, anyways) why Our Hero chooses to:

a) not consult his head of state before undertaking this highly-political mission. His documented approval would have defused the entire internal politics issue in advance.
b) not take any backup with him, which would have removed the issue with him being the single point-of-failure and then getting injured.
c) chose to do the extraction through the highly-populated, highly-technological, highly-observed, and highly-hostile earth of the USA, for no readily apparent reason and against all sense, instead of...
d) doing the extraction through the deserted wilderness that is the world _that he has to go through in the middle anyways_, the extra jump adding great personal danger. And using for transportation...
e) the bloody great world-travelling dirigible that the series goes to great length to point out that he has available at his beck-and-call.

Seriously? He's extracting a willing defector from 50's-era technology using 2020's-era cutting-edge national security level technology _and_ the ability to undetectably teleport to parallel universes, and he _still_ manages to get caught? This guy is the lamest spy _ever_. It is constantly repeated to us both how much extra effort this takes to world-walk twice, to get from Elizabeth's world to that of the USA, _and_ how dangerous it is to be in that world. So why go? Am I supposed to just not notice that? I really tried! But the book kept ramming it down my throat til I nearly choked!

Still, for all my ranting and raving, it _is_ an enjoyable read if you can get past the fact that the world-walkers don't appear to have spent 5 minutes (in the last couple of centuries of their history) thinking about how world-walking works.

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Review: The Red: First Light

The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Near-future cyberpunk military fiction, but with character and plot enough to hold it together. I liked how it sidestepped modern p0litics while still addressing issues; like the way the characters mostly refer to the media as "mediots" ("fake news" anyone?) yet the news reporter Elliot is seen to be an important mediating factor on government excess. The characters show a strong distrust of both corporations (in a very liberal way) and the government (very libertarian.) That leaves us free to judge them on their actions, rather than their politics. I also liked the moment of self-awareness when Our Hero, setting off to Save the World From Itself, realizes that he is, essentially, no different from every terrorist who ever lived.

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Review: Empire Games

Empire Games by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Enjoyed this one quite a bit. I remember feeling a bit let-down by the end of the Merchant Princes series, but this one feels like it gets it's mojo back with a bit of a reboot. Some interesting parallel universe speculation, some fun dystopian spy-thriller bits, and hints of a larger plot explaining how all this came to be.

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Review: Cold Welcome

Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Felt like a good short story stretched over the frame of a novel. Definitely mostly setup for a continuing series, so we never even find out who the badguys are, much the less get any resolution. The survival bits didn't really even have much tension to them; the rescuers give up almost instantly, and our heroes paddle to shore, realize they're short on food, and just walk up the hill to power up the secret base that isn't supposed to exist, on the abandoned continent right next to the spot they happened to land. Also wasn't really sold on why, having found said base, they didn't just phone home and wait for rescue. The evil baddies' sole motivation for being evil appears to have been keeping the secret, so once the secret is out they literally have no motivation at all? If we'd established a threat of them blowing up the base to hide the evidence or something that might have worked, but there really wasn't any of that.

It's still Elizabeth Moon, so it's still well-written and engaging, but there's no real plot here.

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Review: Blackout

Blackout by Connie Willis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review encompasses both this and All Clear, as they do not in any way stand alone; this is basically one novel cut arbitrarily in half.

It's fine I guess? Willis as usual writes interesting characters in well-crafted prose. But this felt enormously stretched out to make two books out of it. The plot is basically "Time travelers get stranded and then eventually get rescued through no fault of their own." The whole conflict hangs heavily on the details of how time travel works, which do not seem to be particularly consistent. On the one hand, these are trained professionals who regularly state that it is a hard-and-fast law that they cannot change the past, and on the other hand those same professionals spend roughly 50% of the text of the books panicking that they might have changed things, and refusing to share information with each other for fear of panicking each other about having changed things. Which they all supposedly know is impossible. And since it is never said _why_ they think it's impossible, we have no reason to doubt it and no basis to disbelieve it. So it ends up a bit like watching some interesting characters in the carefully-researched London Blitz run around like the Keystone Cops, failing at everything they try through coincidence after coincidence. It doesn't really matter that those coincidences are all part of Timey-Wimey Reasons; as the reader it's still just sort of vaguely comicly sad.

I still enjoy her prose, and the detailed picture of life in the Blitz; I just wish there was a story here to wrap it around.

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