Review: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After enjoying The Martian and being deeply disappointed with Artemis, I hesitated for a while about starting this one (I had a pre-release review copy via Netgalley). I'm happy to report that it's a return to the elements that made The Martian work for me.

Weir's two greatest faults - the science infodumps and the "?!" - are on full display still, but at least he's not trying (and notably failing) to write a female protagonist or a heist. He's returned to what made The Martian successful: man alone, far from Earth, using science against the universe. He seems most comfortable (and capable) when his character is like himself: a white, American, STEM-educated man. In other words, there's a thing he can do, and he does it well, and he should probably stick to it rather than try to do something else for which he's ill-equipped.

His main characters all sound a bit alike, in fact - though not to the level of Scalzi, who's incapable of writing a character who doesn't have his exact voice. Ryland Grace is distinct from Mark Watney mainly in that (at least early on; the schtick gets dropped after a while) he swears euphemistically instead of full-out.

This isn't just a rehash of The Martian, though; we have an escalation of the premise. Mark Watney's stakes were his own survival; Ryland Grace's stakes are the survival of billions. We have, in fact, a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, which is a great place to start a novel.

And here we come to what makes these books work for me, and I suspect for many other people. It's not the science infodumps; the books work despite those rather than because of them. It's the emotional beats: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. In this, Weir is doing something that a lot of "hard" science fiction fails to do: giving us characters with agency who protagonize wholeheartedly, rather than just observing events too big for them; and drawing us into their emotional world, making us care about the things they care about and root for their success. While a lot of the emotional beats boil down to "sudden problem arises (usually at the end of a chapter, when the character is congratulating himself on how well things are going); science ensues; problem solved," it's not just the same thing over and over without variation, and there's the larger story problem holding the whole thing together.

The other difference from "hard" science fiction is that, despite all of the actual science spewed onto the page, a lot of what goes on is not that plausible. In fact, for someone who thinks of himself as the "realistic science fiction" guy, Weir certainly spends a lot of time building his plot out of impossibilium, powering it with unobtainium, and facilitating it with unlikely coincidence. I don't have enough background in chemistry or physics to critique those aspects in depth, though there are elements that seem pretty dubious to me, but I do know enough to tell you that his biology is hokey and full of big holes. And there were a number of questions I had which I'll put under a spoiler tag:

(view spoiler)[Why do the Eridians bother to build a space elevator and go to orbit if they have no reason to go further into space? How does their hull robot work if they don't have transistors?

And while I'm talking about the Eridians, I found the character of Rocky, the Eridian engineer, a bit too much like a convenient genie in a bottle. He did also have the important role of giving the protagonist another being to interact with, but he was very much a sidekick; the lone American man ended up saving two entire intelligent races with his help, more than in collaboration with him. That trope of American exceptionalism is a bit of an irritation for me.

I did feel like the ending was the right one: a return to where the character began, emotionally but not physically. Sure, it glides over exactly what the fate of the Earth was (in detail, rather than in the big picture), and leaves us to imagine disaster or triumph to our own taste, and that's a bit of a cheat; but to do otherwise might easily have distracted from the resolution of the story.
(hide spoiler)]

With the unlikely elements, the infodumps, the exclaimed questions, and the limited range the author's showing, this doesn't make it to my Best of the Year list. But I was entertained enough to give it four stars anyway.

View all my reviews

Review: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After enjoying The Martian and being deeply disappointed with Artemis, I hesitated for a while about starting this one (I had a pre-release review copy via Netgalley). I'm happy to report that it's a return to the elements that made The Martian work for me.

Weir's two greatest faults - the science infodumps and the "?!" - are on full display still, but at least he's not trying (and notably failing) to write a female protagonist or a heist. He's returned to what made The Martian successful: man alone, far from Earth, using science against the universe. He seems most comfortable (and capable) when his character is like himself: a white, American, STEM-educated man. In other words, there's a thing he can do, and he does it well, and he should probably stick to it rather than try to do something else for which he's ill-equipped.

His main characters all sound a bit alike, in fact - though not to the level of Scalzi, who's incapable of writing a character who doesn't have his exact voice. Ryland Grace is distinct from Mark Watney mainly in that (at least early on; the schtick gets dropped after a while) he swears euphemistically instead of full-out.

This isn't just a rehash of The Martian, though; we have an escalation of the premise. Mark Watney's stakes were his own survival; Ryland Grace's stakes are the survival of billions. We have, in fact, a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, which is a great place to start a novel.

And here we come to what makes these books work for me, and I suspect for many other people. It's not the science infodumps; the books work despite those rather than because of them. It's the emotional beats: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. In this, Weir is doing something that a lot of "hard" science fiction fails to do: giving us characters with agency who protagonize wholeheartedly, rather than just observing events too big for them; and drawing us into their emotional world, making us care about the things they care about and root for their success. While a lot of the emotional beats boil down to "sudden problem arises (usually at the end of a chapter, when the character is congratulating himself on how well things are going); science ensues; problem solved," it's not just the same thing over and over without variation, and there's the larger story problem holding the whole thing together.

The other difference from "hard" science fiction is that, despite all of the actual science spewed onto the page, a lot of what goes on is not that plausible. In fact, for someone who thinks of himself as the "realistic science fiction" guy, Weir certainly spends a lot of time building his plot out of impossibilium, powering it with unobtainium, and facilitating it with unlikely coincidence. I don't have enough background in chemistry or physics to critique those aspects in depth, though there are elements that seem pretty dubious to me, but I do know enough to tell you that his biology is hokey and full of big holes. And there were a number of questions I had which I'll put under a spoiler tag:

(view spoiler)[Why do the Eridians bother to build a space elevator and go to orbit if they have no reason to go further into space? How does their hull robot work if they don't have transistors?

And while I'm talking about the Eridians, I found the character of Rocky, the Eridian engineer, a bit too much like a convenient genie in a bottle. He did also have the important role of giving the protagonist another being to interact with, but he was very much a sidekick; the lone American man ended up saving two entire intelligent races with his help, more than in collaboration with him. That trope of American exceptionalism is a bit of an irritation for me.

I did feel like the ending was the right one: a return to where the character began, emotionally but not physically. Sure, it glides over exactly what the fate of the Earth was (in detail, rather than in the big picture), and leaves us to imagine disaster or triumph to our own taste, and that's a bit of a cheat; but to do otherwise might easily have distracted from the resolution of the story.
(hide spoiler)]

With the unlikely elements, the infodumps, the exclaimed questions, and the limited range the author's showing, this doesn't make it to my Best of the Year list. But I was entertained enough to give it four stars anyway.

View all my reviews

Review: Shadow of the City: A Rocío and Hala novel

Shadow of the City: A Rocío and Hala novel by R. Morgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A word about the worldbuilding first, since that's what I had the most trouble with.

The setting is an alternate-world South America. Several analogs of European countries are mentioned (with names that struck me as linguistically unlikely in some cases - Enkladt for England?), and while the Spain analog did not colonize South America as such, it did have a cultural influence at least on La Bene, the city where the story is set. Some names and words are Spanish, there are theatres and various other European-style cultural features, and so forth. However, nobody is Catholic (and the character with the Arabic-sounding name isn't Muslim); everyone - except for a recent immigrant - practices a form of ancestor-worship which allows them to speak to their departed ancestors, and at least some also practice what seems to be some kind of paganism.

At the same time, the cultural norms and mores of the city's inhabitants are a remarkably close match for US progressive politics as at right this moment. I managed to be more amused than annoyed by that, though it means the book will date very quickly.

The author's note at the end makes it clear that the reason sexism, homophobia, European colonialism, and organized religion don't exist in this setting is that the author was sick of them and wanted to write a setting that just didn't contain them. Which is not an illegitimate wish, but if you edit out so much of what has shaped our world, you're going to end up with a world that is difficult to account for.

Magic plays a key role, and part of the setup is that magic works differently in different places. It's never explained why this is, or what the underlying mechanism might be. It's clear that magic works differently based on where you are geographically, because immigrants' magic only continues working as it usually does for a short time before shifting to work like the local magic, but the divisions coincide with political, not physical, geography. La Bene has previously been part of both of the neighboring empires (which appear to be uninterrupted local empires; one of them uses the Mayan calendar). I had the impression that it had swapped between the empires several times, before being settled by refugees and allowed to become its own entity as a buffer between the empires (which itself felt somewhat unlikely to me). Yet the magic in La Bene is distinctly different from the magic in both of the empires.

So I had some significant questions and hesitations about the worldbuilding. Apart from that, it's a decent mystery novel in which good-hearted detectives face their own issues while tracking down the criminal. I felt that the pacing of the mystery plot did suffer from the amount of time devoted to the protagonist's personal conflicts, which, while well portrayed, were not as interesting (or important) to me as the resolution of the crime. What that did provide, though, was more depth to the characters; there was more of that than I usually see.

A competent editor has done a good (but, inevitably, not completely perfect) job with the manuscript; in the pre-release review copy I received via Netgalley for review, the errors were few.

Overall, then, a sound plot (if with some pacing issues for me), characters with depth, and capable prose. If the worldbuilding had been less of a problem for me, it would have landed easily on my Best of the Year list. As it was, it still gets four stars.

View all my reviews

Review: Death Before Dragons ~ Books 1-3

Death Before Dragons ~ Books 1-3 by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lindsay Buroker books are essentially popcorn, but they're well-crafted, well-edited and consistent popcorn, a big step up from what I refer to as "extruded fiction product". The banter is amusing; the characters are driven through the plot by believable motivations, solving problems with bravery and intelligence; there's tension, suspense, excitement, romance (usually with a slow burn), and sensawunda.

This series is urban fantasy, in more or less the style of Jim Butcher, though with a much more Dungeons and Dragons-like universe (there are orcs, for example). The protagonist, though, is not a wizard but an assassin who has assembled a collection of magical amulets and weapons to help her in her work, killing dangerous and murderous supernatural beings for the US Army as a contractor. I don't generally like assassin characters, what with the whole killing-people-for-money thing, but this one worked OK for me; she only kills murderers (and the occasional rapist), only non-humans, and she's trying to improve her reputation and relationship with other non-human beings who are not criminals. Putting the criminals through the justice system is not an option, because the governments of the world have decided on a policy of denial towards otherworldly beings, and they don't officially exist or have any rights. But as the books progress, she does start wondering whether that's the way things should be.

I've heard it said that authors usually only have about 10 characters who they re-cast in new roles with each book or series, and I definitely felt that with these - we have the self-regarding but useful companion, the competent but worried female MC, the dangerous, haughty and emotionally reserved love interest, and so on, and all of them seemed like I'd seen them before under other names. But I did enjoy the ride, and plan to pick up the rest of the series in due course.

View all my reviews

Review: Mary Quirk and the Secret of Umbrum Hall

Mary Quirk and the Secret of Umbrum Hall by Anna St. Vincent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What I loved about this book:

1. The protagonist, a teenage girl, is practical, sensible, and (even though she experiences some understandable strong emotions given the events that occur) capable of calming herself down and getting on with the job at hand. She's the kind of person whose goal is to keep her head down, her grades up, and her sarcastic thoughts from escaping her mouth, because she doesn't want any drama.

2. Of course, she gets a big heaping portion of drama. But not in the usual YA "the adults are incompetent or neglectful, therefore the kids are forced into heroism" way. The adults are pretty competent, but they do need the kids to step up as well, for believable reasons.

3. She knows the difference between illusive and elusive. The writing is, in fact, literate in general, doesn't make any of the usual errors, and is one of those books you can just relax into because (as a reader once said of Roger Zelazny) within a couple of paragraphs you know you're in good hands.

4. It's set in a magic school, but it isn't just another bad photocopy of what the characters call "the H place" with a cast and plot that are thinly disguised fanfiction/made from box mix. The setting has an entirely new and fresh kind of sensawunda, the high-school shenanigans are kept to a minimum, the romance is slow-burn and low-key, and all in all it's a good ride.

The only thing I didn't like is that there wasn't more of it, and I'm eagerly waiting for the sequel.

View all my reviews

Review: Goddess of the North

Goddess of the North by Georgina Kamsika
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Might well have received five stars if the author knew how to use (or rather, when not to use) coordinate commas - those were a near-constant irritation. Some other copy editing issues too, not major - dangling modifiers, misplaced apostrophes, a couple of homonyms. Although I got it as a review copy from Netgalley, the publication date is in the past, so I assume these errors are in the published version.

Otherwise, a fine piece of urban fantasy writing, let down by the editing and the murky cover. It deals excellently with themes of immigration, racism, and who belongs to a place, through a mythological lens. It's absolutely woven into the plot that an immigrant can care for a place more, and have more stake in defending its people, than a "native" whose focus is on themselves and what they feel they've lost or are in danger of losing. It also questions the very idea of "nativism" on the way through. It's far from being a political screed, though, and the characters are an eclectic balance of flaws, foibles, and strengths, all of which cross ethnic lines. There's no simplistic "four legs good, two legs bad" going on here.

The protagonist is an aspect of a Hindu goddess who's living as a human and working as a police officer (she's a goddess of order). She has to balance imposing order on a world filled with supernatural beings with keeping the humans unaware of their activities and providing mundane explanations for the crimes they commit. She's also striving not to use her goddess power (because it will make her less human), and still dealing with her feelings about a betrayal by her mother thousands of years before, the nature of which is gradually revealed.

All of this provides plenty of tension and plot momentum, even before disaster strikes. As an urban fantasy, it's inevitably compared to Jim Butcher, and there are similarities: the characterization is rich; there's a layer of insight into human (and humanlike) nature and the way the world is for people and how they tend to behave; and multiple potential disasters of all sizes are constantly threatening the protagonist and those she cares about. (view spoiler)[Where it differs is that this author pulls her punches a little and uses literal divine intervention to prevent the disasters from having too much impact or much of a body count. Given that I don't enjoy "dark" stories, I can hardly complain about that, and yet it does rob the story of some of its edge. (hide spoiler)]

Has very strong potential, and a better copy editor could easily take it into five-star territory. I will be following this author, and looking eagerly for future books in the series.

View all my reviews

Review: The Case of the Dragon-Bone Engine

The Case of the Dragon-Bone Engine by Galadriel Coffeen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've so often been disappointed by steampunk that I very nearly gave this five stars just for being competent.

It's really more magepunk, though there is some steam about; the dragon-bone engine of the title is an alternative to a steam engine, installed in a train (there are also some installed in early motor-cars). The female protagonist is competent and sensible, which is a nice contrast to the usual steampunk heroine, and the love interest for the low-key, slow-burn romance is a decent guy. They have realistic conflicts in their backstories and come across as real people living in a real city, not just cardboard cutouts in front of a painted backdrop.

The secondary-world setting has some intriguing features that are not part of the central mystery and are just how the world is for the characters. For instance, there are very few stars, which caught my interest and made me want to know more. It isn't all just out of the familiar box.

Deeply woven into the plot is the kind of entangled social and technological change that so often fails to be featured in steampunk (and, in my view, the genre is the poorer for the lack) - the kind of change that was such a feature of the real Victorian era. There's prejudice to combat; some of it is against the protagonist, who's the first female agent in a law-enforcement body, but that theme isn't beaten to death. Though she has to prove herself more because of her gender, her obvious competence means that it isn't a constant struggle. More prejudice exists against faeries, who are a small minority of the population, able to use magic, and seen as lazy and stupid and a threat by many of the human majority. This drives the plot in a satisfactory way. There are unscrupulous wealthy industrialists, wild-eyed revolutionaries, and decent people just trying to get on in the world. The police work is solid, the characters' personal stories mesh well into the plot, and overall it's a good piece of work. It's also (even in the pre-release version I had from Netgalley for review) better edited than most steampunk, or for that matter most SFF, that I've come across.

Though in the end I decided it wasn't quite all the way to the five-star level for me, I'm confident that the author will write five-star books in the future, and I very much want to read them.

View all my reviews

Review: Thurmond's Saga: Being a Recounting of How a Young Peasant Lad Sought Renown as a Slayer of Fell Beasts

Thurmond's Saga: Being a Recounting of How a Young Peasant Lad Sought Renown as a Slayer of Fell Beasts by Robert John MacKenzie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wavered between three and four stars. It's mostly OK, but the plot is overly reliant on coincidence and luck for my taste. Near the end, it looks like the author is setting up a whole lot more book, then he seems to realize that he needs to finish it and just wraps up all the remaining plot threads, some in not particularly likely ways.

He should definitely get someone other than his kids to copy edit it before publication. Someone whose vocabulary is better than his, and who checks carefully for homonyms - just because spellcheck says that there's a word spelled that way doesn't mean it's the word you meant.

The setting is a gritty, more-than-usually-realistic medieval fantasy world. There's a high body count, the nobility are bastards and the peasantry can't really win, and goblins and their like are uncomplicatedly evil, rightful targets for violence and looting because they engage in so much... violence and looting. Plus they're ugly, and uncultured, and don't look like us.

It's more or less a D&D slashfest, with the low-level main characters overpowered by design and thrown a ridiculous amount of luck so that they can survive the adventure and come out of it more-or-less triumphant. It's not without its charm and humour, and the protagonist learns some good life lessons, but overall, for me it was less than successful.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

View all my reviews

Review: Spell of Apocalypse

Spell of Apocalypse by Mayer Alan Brenner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wish I'd taken the title seriously. I dislike apocalyptic, and this is it.

To all the faults of the previous books in the series - overly high-flown language, overly complex machinations, occasional odd OCR errors - is added a general darkening as the plot goes on.

It's an interesting world, and I like sword-and-sorcery and was able to enjoy it when it was that, but overall, a bit of a disappointing conclusion to a less-than-outstanding series.

View all my reviews

Review: The Defiant Spark

The Defiant Spark by Annie Percik
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So forgettable that I had to open it three or four days after I finished it to even remember what book it was.

A kind of contemporary alternate-universe fantasy, in which devices (known as artefacts) run by magic. They are all called X-e-facts, where X is what they do; a car is a speed-e-fact, a phone is a call-e-fact, and so on. This becomes annoying almost immediately.

Most of the characters are flat and have no real arc, with the exception, not of the male lead and (arguable) protagonist, but of his love interest - who has to have an arc, and change, to be someone we would want to see him with. Unlike the rest of the characters, she has hints of backstory and touches of things about her that are not simply about her role in the plot but about her being a rounded, believable character. Everyone else, including the male lead, seems to have sprung into existence fully formed at the point they're introduced to the plot, and then undergoes very little more development. Jen barely has any characteristics at all, and Marco has very little beyond his "protagonist's best mate" role.

(view spoiler)[Although it seems for a long time that the corporations are evil fronts for a terrible conspiracy, in the end it's just a couple of bad actors in a benevolent conspiracy that's doing its best, and everything is wrapped up neatly and easily. (hide spoiler)]

The conscious-robots subplot is underdeveloped, and never really seemed that integrated with the main plot to me. The triggering event - the MC giving a robot a name instead of a number - seems like an insufficient cause for the effect it has.

All this is presented to us in the punctuation style I think of as "British breathless," because it needs about 20% more commas, mostly between grammatical clauses.

Not recommended.

View all my reviews