Review: Rogue Protocol

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much more like the first, and better for it. I think a bit more action did it a world of good. Still a bit weird how MB is the world's greatest super-hacker with skills above-and-beyond even the imaginings of anyone else in the world. I mean, if anyone even suspected that military-grade power armor could be remotely hacked into an immobile prison by the average mall cop in seconds, I'm gonna guess that no one much would wear it. But hand-wave that and this is a good tale.

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Review: The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The best science fiction usually asks a question: "What if the world was like this...?" The Three-Body Problem asks the question "What if evangelical Christians were right?" What if there was an all-powerful being/group who is messing with us, and none of science is really rules of nature just guidelines used for trolling scientists. And the answer is of course "Well absolutely anything could be true then." Which is just not very interesting.

The science in this book is mostly obviously nonsense. Which is not necessarily a problem; the science in most sci-fi is nonsense. The problem here is that it's not even vaguely-plausible nonsense. Stars moving so fast and so close to a planet as to reverse the direction of the dawn, and yet the tidal forces not ripping the planet to char-broiled shreds. A planet being flung from orbiting one star in a trinary to another continuously for millenia without ever being flung far into the frozen darkness or plunged into a sun. A civilization built entirely around dealing with the unpredictable heat and cold of their planet, invents a technology which can completely control all radiation in or out of a planet. And then _doesn't_ use it around their own planet, to solve their own problem, but promptly ships it light years away to help invade Earth.

But look, science fiction is full of nonsense science. It tells a good story not because humans can safely travel faster-than-light, but because it explores the question of what people and society would be like if we could. And that's where Three Body Problem truly falls short. There are no fully-formed characters in this book. They do not evolve or change over it's course. There is no coherent plot that gives us any insight into society or even just amuses us with a pleasant arc. The best we get is a few vignettes about the Chinese Cultural Revolution which are quite interesting, but then leave us hanging while all the scientists commit suicide because playing a computer game made them realize that science wasn't real (which I also didn't believe.) It trudges in a circle and ends up back where it started, and neither the journey nor the destination held much interest.

Gave it a second star for those intriguing stories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. That I would read more of.

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Review: Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not nearly as compelling as the first one. The primary conflict / character development seems to be about the terror MB feels about interacting with humans. The first 40% of this very short book has it riding on an automated spaceship with no humans present, telling us the whole time how scared it is of humans. 40% in it actually comes face-to-face with a human for the first time this book, and from that moment on it seems to essentially forget any sense of fear, and act supremely confidently and competently at all times. MB seems a bit classically MarySue-ish, in that it is extremely competent in all things mental and physical - to the point of being genuinely superhumanly above every other character in the book in all ways except the robot ship sidekick - and it's only weakness is its anxiety-driven inferiority complex. Honestly, if everyone who has these SecBot mods is able to essentially remotely control all computers - including security and banks - to the point of trivially re-writing things in realtime, then why on Earth aren't the humans lining up to have it done? Or for that matter just ordering SecBots to do it on their behalf? And we keep going back-and-forth between MB being able to seemlessly pass as human, and it being essentially an unstoppable invulnerable physical paragon compared to mere humans. Everyone who could afford it would have that done.

The earlier story kind of worked, because we didn't have time to dwell on any of these issues, and the action was all isolated from society on a remote survey planet. Bringing MB home exposes the lack of any kind of logic or societal framework that would somehow explain all of this discrepancy, and this book doesn't even try to give us any answers. It's still amusing enough to read along with, but it's straining really hard at the bounds of my suspension of disbelief. (I'm also a huge hypocrite, because I often fault SF books for being overly long and needing a good editor, but I'd have been hugely disappointed if I'd paid full price for this tiny book instead of getting it from the library. If you're Ursula Le Guin you can sell me a 150-page book for full price; the Dispossessed this aint.)

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Review: A Little Hatred

A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As usual for Abercrombie, this is well-crafted gritty fantasy. Back in the First Law series he had a technique of skipping from PoV character to character in the middle of the action, but having them coincidentally echo each others lines. It was clever there, but almost a bit too much so. Here he's swapped to switching between PoV characters involved in the same scene - suddenly seeing the same scene through a differing perspective - and it really works with this story. One danger: in the past the author re-used a lot of characters from one book / series to another, but was always careful to re-introduce them, so having read the other books was not critical. He's largely given up on that here. I read this having not read any Abercrombie in a couple of years, and I struggled a bit to remember things I was obviously supposed to know about certain characters. I figured things out eventually, but I had to go back and re-read First Law to get a few things to really gell.

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