One day eighteen years ago, Gideon’s mother had tumbled down the middle of the shaft in a dragchute and a battered hazard suite, like some moth drifting slowly down into the dark. The suit had been out of power for a couple of minutes. The woman landed brain-dead. All the battery power had been sucked away by a bio-container plugged into the suit, the kind you’d care a transplant limb in, and inside that container was Gideon, only a day old.
This was obviously mysterious as hell.
After how much I enjoyed Annihilation, I had high hopes for Authority. A chance to get out of Area X and explore the organization sending people in / to their deaths over and over again…
But unfortunately, I just couldn’t get into it. I missed the limited focus and the mystery of the first book. Even, for what very little we knew about them, the characters.
You must understand how I felt then, how the surveyor must have felt: We were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny. In unusual situations there can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy. Now we had come close to the edges of something unprecedented, and less than a week into our mission we had lost not just the linguist at the border but our anthropologist and our psychologist.
Now that is a fascinating sort of book. It’s essentially a slice of life mixed with cosmic horror. The entire story follows an expedition into the mysterious, alien Area X. There’s not really any overarching plot, other than exploring and perhaps surviving… and maybe if you’re really really lucky, coming back without going mad.
Well, there’s that. It’s a bit out of genre for me–read by group choice, so I really don’t know how it compares to it’s peer books, but I enjoyed it well enough. It was certainly fascinating to read at the same time as Six Wakes (which, to be honest, I enjoyed rather more).
Overall, the plot is fine. It’s a murder mystery. There are a few decent bits of interesting world building. It’s a small town with what seems to me an unusually large art scene and number of bow hunters. There are some witchy bits which really made me wish this was actually subtle urban fantasy. And a few twists and turns along the way.
With a sigh, I resign myself to combing through it page by page, though 502 pages is so many to wade through, and I curse authors who write such lengthy books when a few neat pages of prose would do.
– Roughly halfway through a nearly 1000 page book
In a nutshell, Six Wakes is a closed room murder mystery in SPACE! With clones! What that gives us is an absolutely wonderful variation on the tropes. Because of cloning technology, you can very well have a murder mystery where the cast wake up to the gruesome (zero gee) murder of … the entire cast. And because it’s a generation ship in deep space, you very well know that one of the cast absolutely has to have been the muderer… Unless it was more than one.
My favorite parts of the worldbuilding all really revolve around technology of cloning and how that can change the world in fascinating ways. For example, it’s not uncommon for attendees at certain parties to end murdered. They’ll wake up in the morning, restored from a backup the day before with little more than a feeling of ’that must have been one hell of a party’ plus some potential embarrassment and go about their lives.
Oh that’s a wonderful book. If your read and enjoyed The Martian, you’ll almost certainly love Project Hail Mary . The sense of humor mixed with scientific/engineering problem solving is the main strength in both. Great fun.
It’s got a wonderful sense of humor:
X-COM holds a special place in my life. It was one of if not the very first computer games I bought. I played the heck out of that game; I bought the strategy guide (and got one for Apocalypse, even though I didn’t yet own it) and still fire up an emulator to give it a try every year or three. It’s just a wonderful tactics game, the like of which I’ve never really managed to find again—at least to my tastes.
So when I saw the Kickstarter for a Monsters in the Dark, I knew I had to give it a go.
Programming languages are something of a hobby of mine. Going as far back as undergrad, I’ve written a fair few interpreters and compilers over the years. I’ve never really gotten beyond a strong basic level, but I’ve always wanted to. Crafting Interpreters is a great book for exactly that.
The book essentially walks you through two styles of interpreter of the same language: just an AST walking style written in Java (the sort I’ve done a few times) and then a much more optimized one based on bytecode. There was something to learn on both sections though, since the the introduced language (lox) includes higher order functions and closures—certainly more interesting bits of languages to implement.
The reviews of Mexican Gothic are … divided to say the least. There’s more than a handfull of glowing five star reviews and a smaller but still significant number that just didn’t get what the fuss was about. Halfway through… I totally get it.
I think the main problem is the absolute tonal shift that happens about halfway through the book.