Short Book Reviews: A Time-Twisting Space Mystery

 Eversion, by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit)

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite writers of hard science fiction. His stories sweep me up in adventure, mystery, and very cool ideas. With Eversion, he’s reached new heights of complex yet rewarding storytelling. In it, he builds mystery upon mystery, with each layer adding connections and insights. He always “plays fair,” giving the reader everything they need to understand the characters and the dilemmas he has thrust them into at that moment. The book is a primer of brilliantly handled plot twists!

The story begins as a sea adventure: an 1800s expedition to discover an enigmatic structure, “the Edifice,” deep within a fissure in the ice cliffs of Norway. The narrator is the ship’s physician, recruited at the last minute and therefore not on the ship’s manifest. As he performs his medical duties, he develops relationships with the rest of the crew and passengers, including the arrogant tycoon who’s financed the expedition, a brilliant but tortured young mathematician, and a disturbingly flirtatious woman who seems to have no other function than to torment the doctor. Soon, however, things go horribly wrong. Even as the ship finds the bizarre, possibly inhuman structures of the Edifice, it also discovers the wreckage of an earlier ship, one the tycoon lied about… and then the doctor dies and finds himself a century later on an airship encountering the Edifice in a different, expanded form, and the previous ship, but with strange, fragmented memories of having been in a similar situation before. With each iteration of an exploration gone horribly wrong, the doctor makes new connections and comes closer to what’s really going on, the truth beneath the narratives. It’s a gorgeous spiral of self-discovery, tense action, and ultimate sacrifice.

Short Book Reviews: A Virtual Reality Mystery Thriller

The Extractionist, by Kimberly Unger (Tachyon)

In a world in which people upload their minds into virtual reality, things sometimes go awry and they get stuck in “the Swim.” Enter Eliza McKay, freelance Extractionist. Highly skilled in navigating virtual reality, thanks to a combination of experience, native talent, and extensive implanted hardware, she’s the go-to specialist for difficult retrieval cases. Now she’s on assignment for a government agency, trying to preserve the investigation results of an agent’s digital persona gone missing in the Swim. One thing after another goes wrong, and soon she’s faced with a choice of pulling the agent out without what he’s learned or having to try ever more risky strategies. Then thugs break into her house and try to hack her cybernetic implants. And something dangerous is lurking in the Swim.

Like Unger’s debut novel, Nucleation, The Extractionist features vivid and highly imaginative hard science fiction world-building. I’m not a tech person or familiar with virtual reality, but the characters and situations were compelling enough to keep me reading, and eventually the internal consistency made sense to me. The story is full of fascinating details, like the need to replace neurotransmitter chemicals after a prolonged VR session. Unger writes with the ease of familiarity with challenging technical material, so that even if I couldn’t explain what was happening, I knew she could. The sureness of an author’s voice can carry us into worlds and situations we’ve never experienced for ourselves. Unger’s work is cutting-edge science fiction. I can hardly wait to see what she comes up with next!

Short Book Reviews: Changing the Story Halfway

The Last Human, by Zack Jordan (Del Rey)

I know this book has received a lot of buzz but frankly I found it disappointing and gave up near the end. The beginning was awesome: Sarya, a human teen raised by a voraciously violent, gigantic spider-with-razor-legs, lives on a space station with many other species, all joined by the Network, a galaxy-wide AI that offers communications and diplomatic services to those species who join, and ruthless segregation to those who refuse. Humankind is not among them; in fact, humans are considered to be extinct, so Sarya disguises her species. Various events catapult Sarya from her disadvantaged and frustrated life, variously aided and threatened by an array of fascinating aliens, and Sarya’s history – and the fate of humankind -- begins to be revealed.

That’s the story I was led to expect. But when Sarya is killed and her consciousness restored by the AI of all godlike AIs, I felt as if I had inadvertently stumbled into a cross between a New Age pseudoreligious tract and The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I wasn’t nearly as interested in the new story, and I found the switch from coming-of-age and girl-finds-herself to tongue-in-cheek super-cosmic saving-the-universe a definite let-down. 

I also confess to a personal animus against the idea of species exceptionalism. I disagreed with the idea that humans were too dangerous a species to be allowed to exist (and that this specialness was admirable). If anything, our understanding of our place in the natural world demonstrates that our destructiveness is a bad thing, detrimental to our own survival, and that our saving grace is our capacity for compassion, not ruthlessness.