Integral Trees Book Cover

When I review hard SF, I often loathe to give away juicy details about the setting, because discovering them is part of the joy of reading such books. I don’t really have such reservations with Integral Trees because Niven front-loads most of the hard science into a gigantic expository dump in the first few dozen pages. Everything you need to know about the setting is condensed at the beginning of the book, accompanied by helpful diagrams that help you understand it. So I don’t really feel bad for spoiling it here.

Imagine a binary solar system composed of a neutron star and a regular main phase yellow star. The neutron star has a single captured satellite, which happens to be a gas giant in an unusually low orbit just beyond it’s Roche limit. Because of the tidal forces acting on the planet in such a low orbit most of the lighter gasses from it’s atmosphere have been siphoned out into a vast gas torus surrounding the neutron star. The torus is about a million kilometers thick, and it’s dense core (known as the “Smoke Ring”) is composed almost entirely from nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen forming a breathable atmosphere. The companion yellow star provides ample sunlight allowing life to flourish and evolve within the narrow gas ring.

The Smoke Ring is essentially a world of endless sky. There is no solid ground anywhere within the ring, but water is plentiful. Of course since everything is in free-fall, it does not form lakes or rivers but rather coalesces into spherical floating globules. Most of plants and animals that inhabit the ring are free fall adapted, capable of limited flight and possess trilateral symmetry allowing them to see in all directions without repositioning. Plants, on average are fragile, spindly and tend to form dense clumps, using foliage and web-like branches for both photosynthesis and capturing and sieving up organic matter from the air, as it floats by.

Picture of the spherical plant life clumps within the smoke ring.

The one exception to this rule are the titular integral trees, which are absolutely massive. The largest of the trees grow up to about a hundred kilometers in length, and are tidally locked with respect to the neutron star. Their center of mass is located at the mid point of the trunk, and both ends terminate in a tuft of foliage. The tuft ends are typically subject to gale force winds which causes them to bend in opposite directions, giving the plants the characteristic, integral-sign shape after which they were named.

The tufts collect water and floating debris to and provide natural shelter for all kinds of smaller animals, and parasitic plants. The tidal forces create a gravity like effect, that pulls nearby objects toward the trunk. Any water that collects on the trunk is pushed towards the tufts, creating little streams and rivulets across the bark. As a result each tree is it’s own, tiny, self contained ecosystem.

This is probably why they were chosen by human colonists who discovered the torus roughly five hundred years before the events described in the books. The original settlers were mutineers who have rebelled against the oppressive totalitarian state, and escaped into the the smoke ring, and established a new civilization there. Most build communities within the tree tufts, or in the radial jungles. Because resources required to build industry (such as heavy metals) are scarce in the Smoke Ring they live simple rural lives, holding on to the few old technological gadgets they were able to preserve and keep in working condition. In most communities the post of a “Scientist” is akin to that of a shaman: a community healer and spiritual leader, who consults ancient records to get insights into the true nature of things.

The picture from the expanded cover, featuring the bending trunk of an Integral Tree.

This is a fantastic, and incredibly imaginative setting. But once you read through the first chapter, you basically know all there is to know about it, at which point you might as well just close the book and do something else. The rest of the book is just boring people, having boring adventures. The few revelations about the setting that have not been jam-packed into the introduction, are delivered in the laziest way possible. In most cases the characters simply read a paragraph of notes left behind the original settlers, and then complain that they don’t understand what it means. It is obvious that these exposition dumps are intended for the readers, since not even the tribal “Scientists” remember enough of the old science to decipher them fully.

Bland characters and less than stellar conflict and resolution are not uncommon problems in the realm of hard SF. Writers who can deliver compelling science lectures wrapped inside space adventure novels often struggle to portray believable, characters that readers can relate to. The undisputed masters of the genre however tend to be aware of this, and route around the problem. Gregg Egan for example is really good at centering his novels around some novel scientific quagmire or mystery that the characters seek to solve. Even though some of his characters may be only broad personality sketches, they become relocatable due to sharing a common goal with the readers: the need to solve and unravel the same scientific puzzle. Egan also tends to make his protagonists somewhat odd, alien or somehow exceptional and unique: they are genderless artificial intelligences, disembodied post-humans and etc.. This often tricks the readers to latch that much harder onto the few human qualities they do display.

Niven’s approach is the direct opposite of this. His characters are bland every-men, who neatly fit into a few standard archetypes they never seem to outgrow. All the interesting information in front loaded, or delivered in exposition globs, meaning he can’t trickle small revelations about the nature of the smoke ring throughout the novel. His book is constructed to rely on the strength of his characters. Unfortunately, none of them are likeable enough for one to care about their struggles.

The cultures of the Smoke Ring are also extremely rudimentary and boring. One would think that since travel is difficult, and inhabitants for different trees rarely come into contact with each other, their cultures would vary. One would think that inhabitants of a free floating spherical jungle would live a drastically different than people who inhabit the trees. But the differences between all these people are mostly superficial. They use different governing systems (some more oppressive, other more democratic) but that’s about it.

People of the Smoke Ring have no religions, no legends and no superstition. Their lives seem impossibly boring, shallow and petty. Even the one mildly interesting plot hook is completely wasted. The ancient ramjet used by the original colonists is still orbiting the gas torus. It is controlled by an AI which is still loyal to the state, and has spent the last five centuries plotting how to re-integrate the free people of the Smoke Ring back into the State. The ship and the diabolically intelligent entity that controls it are a constant threat, which never fully pays off.

The book as a whole is disappointing. A fantastic setting ruined by poor execution, bland characters and uninteresting conflict.

Ocean at the end of the Lane book cover.

After the silliness of following the misadventures of the sons of the trickster god, Gaiman’s latest novel brings things back around to a more serious, almost ominous tone. For all intents and purposes this short novel is a distillation of the modern fairy tale style that the author has been polishing for years. And as such it is almost perfect. While his previous works read as stories set in fantastic fairy tale like settings, this one reads like a genuine article. It is a modern folk tale for people with modern sensibilities, but as strange and fantastical as any old legend would be.

It follows a man who arrives at his home town for a funeral, and is instantly flooded by old childhood memories of certain event that happened when he was very young. He has forgotten all about it, or more likely discarded the memories as some feverish dream or trick of childhood imagination. But seeing the familiar surroundings brings those memories forward and he vividly recalls the time when he tangled with other-worldly forces.

I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot, because part of the fun of the novel is trying to figure out what is going on. Gaiman plays his cards close to the chest and only reveals what is absolutely necessary, allowing the reader’s imagination to run wild. Instead of using already established mythological creatures or entities he seems to invent his own but refuses to name them, instead always referring to them with mundane, earthly names or descriptive epithets. Despite that, these strange beings feel no less authentic and even more ancient than the gods and creatures from his past novels.

The novel is essentially a glimpse into the lives of some primordial Fae beings, older than the universe itself who choose to play humans and live simple, mundane and trivial lives here on Earth. And the more mundane and human they behave, the more mysterious and fascinating they seem because the readers know that there lies an ocean of unfathomable depth below that facade they put up when dealing with ordinary people.

The novel is shorter than the already compact Anansi Boys and this is partly due to the book’s narrow, almost laser like focus. Gaiman’s style is by no means minimalistic, but he describes and reveals just enough information to keep the plot flowing and make things interesting, but nothing beyond that. This storytelling style reminded me of City at the end of Time but with a much narrower, localized focus. He does not go on expository digressions or lengthy world-building dialogs. The rules of his universe are purposefully shrouded in secret and only revealed as the action progresses. This makes it a fast and almost effortless read. In fact the book is hard to put down once you start reading it. Gaiman draws you into his magical world right away, and starts increasing the tension and raising the stakes immediately afterwards.

If you are a Neil Gaiman fan, or would like to see how to masterfully merge a Fae folk legend with a modern setting, definitely pick this book up. I highly recommend it.

About a year ago I wrote a gigantic 3 part review of Jacek Dukaj’s mega-anthology King of Pain. It was a huge, encyclopedic size collection of short stories and novellas, chief among which was The King of Pain and the Grasshopper. I wrote about it in part 2 of my review and while it was not my favorite story in the set, I genuinely enjoyed it. I’m bringing it up because at the core it is had the same basic premise and Budz’s novel: it also depicted a world in which a cutting edge biotechnology allowed our species to self-segregate into distinct, non-compatible biological clades hyper-adopted to artificial environments. Dukaj took this idea and kept winding it up until he produced a story about a sort of bio-warfare waste accidentally jump-starting a brand new, fast evolving, hyper adaptive alien life and eventually a kind of biological singularity. Budz on the other hand is more interested in writing a Bio-punk techno-thriller.

Clade: book cover

Both authors however start with the same idea: a chain of man made eco-disasters makes the planet near inhabitable forcing humanity to use aggressive bio-engineering to create brand new versions crops and livestock that can survive on a planet ravished by pollution, corporate chemical warfare, and fast mutating rogue commercial retro-viruses. Come to think of it, Paolo Bacigalupi also started with this premise in his Windup Girl but he allowed the civilization to fall, and then wrote about the survivors. Dukaj and Budz both assume human ingenuity can not as much save the planet, but re-make the nature to the point where it can be reigned in and controlled narrowly avoiding apocalypse. The former, explored a setting in which the exponential progress curve is not tapered by the ecological near-apocalypse and new disruptive technologies keep pushing the environment towards another collapse. In Clade the ecological collapse is a wakeup call which results in heavy regulation and tight corporate control yielding a return to stable ecology at the cost of social upheaval.

Dukaj is a bit old school in that he believes that the only entities with enough resources to survive global biosphere collapse are heavily industrialized first world nations. The major superpowers seal themselves against the outside world and employ a kind of genomic frequency hopping to protect themselves from rampant, inexpensive bio-terrorism. Budz, much like Bacigalupi does not believe that the traditional nation state notion can survive in a post-ecology world. He sees old power structures fold and the factual power rests on the corporate backbone that underpinned and financed them. It is corporations that re-shape and re-make their environment, and it is human greed (rather than fear, nationalism and xenophobia as in King of Pain) that shapes the new social landscape.

Your clade is determined not by citizenship, but by your class. You are claded for the job you do, and the neighborhood you live in. Unlike Dukaj’s post-apocalyptic vision of sequence-hopping biospheres, Budz’s Earth is still a global village. As long as you have the money you can travel and go as you please. If you are a blue collar worker, or an unemployed slum dweller however, the “nice neighborhoods” are off limits to you – your body is simply won’t survive there. Don’t even think about stepping into a high end Gucci or Armani boutique unless you want to be coughing and pissing blood for the next few months (provided security guards can drag you out before you go into anaphylactic shock). In fact, even loitering outside the store will probably give you a bad rash. Need to go to a rich neighborhood for work? Don’t worry, they’ll temporarily re-clad you. Just remember not to kiss your wife because she might have a bad reaction and die. As visions of future go, this one is pretty grim, but not hopeless.

Out of the three post-ecology I mentioned, Burdz’s is possibly the most optimistic one. The environment, though far from healthy is stable. The economy is booming. The protagonist is a low wage latino bio-tech support worker cum gardener whose task is to take care of special vegetation genegineered to be used by orbital mining and research colonies. This job was his big break, and he hopes to use it to escape the slums where he grew up. He is an ordinary guy with big dreams and a lot of ambition, and eagerness to impress his supervisors which makes him a perfect pawn in a game of corporate espionage and sabotage.

Budz borrows heavily from the old-school Cyber-punk tradition but makes it feel fresh by imbuing it with modern sensibilities, and replacing clunky and ostentatious plastic and chrome with subtle bio-tech and nano-machines. Instead of Gibsonian cyberspace he describes ubiquitous social networks, and idiosyncratic, self learning, personal assistant AI’s whose buggy programming has them grow neurotic and ever more capricious as they get closer to approximating human personalities.

Unlike Dukaj who chases after the big ideas big payoffs, Budz takes time to flesh out his characters, explore their world, and touch upon the social and racial tensions in a world where social mobility is biologically impossible and the clade system is used as a tool in class warfare. Highlighting these tensions is not his focus though. He is more interested in creating a high-stakes techno-thriller adventure in which the little guy sticks it to the man and gets rich at the end. And it’s a pity, because his version of post-eco-collapse world could have been used for some much deeper and heart-felt exploration of the contemporary social issues. If you’re looking for that, then Bacigalupi is your man. If you want high-concept unrestrained singularity-edge SF go with Dukaj. What Budz delivers is a fun, entertaining adventure with likable characters and couple of memorable set pieces.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said R. R. Martin in his fifth book about the same group of characters inhabiting the same functional universe, and I keep wondering whether or not it is at all worth sacrificing seven of mine to see his epic through to the end, when it will be televised by HBO anyway. I could easily spend that time exploring other worlds, other ideas and other stories instead of worrying whether or not Tyrion is going to get brutally murdered at some wedding (this is not a spoiler, at least not that I know of). The mere fact that I care about Tyrion and Danny and bunch of other characters (most of whom are dead now) is an undeniable testament to Martin’s craft. He found our literary g-spot and he is working it raw (albeit very slowly). God bless him for that. I hope he lives a hundred more of valve-time years and writes 15 more books for us. But as great as his series might be, it isn’t about anything in particular. Entertaining and captivating and heart breaking: yes. But new installments don’t necessarily explore many new depths.

Miéville’s fantasy series is different in that each book about something. Each one has a particular theme and set of ideas it tries to explore. While the setting is recycled, protagonists are not and so each novel comes with a new set of personal journeys and character arcs. Each book has something different to offer. Perdido Street Station was a fantastic steam-punk thriller with a really cool nightmarish monster, and a deliciously tragic story of a man (well Garuda but whatever) guilty of an esoteric crime seeking to escape the punishment he actually deserves via arcane magical science. The Scar was a pirate adventure story with a big treasure hunt, a larger than life sea monster, floating city and explored bizarre, exotic cultures. Iron Council is probably the most ambitious and the most literary installment in the cycle because it deals with a rather loaded topic: inequality and class warfare. It is a novel about revolutions and social upheavals.

The Book Cover

Perdido touched upon New Corbuzon’s corrupt political system, and The Scar did introduce the readers to the plight of the setting’s subaltern underclass: the Remade – men and women marked for life, and stripped of human dignity and human rights as punishment for crimes both real and imaginary dealt out by the ineffectual, corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Iron Council however brings these themes to the forefront and builds the story around them.

It wasn’t so long ago that young idealistic dreamers, united by their dissatisfaction by the growing wealth disparity and the progressing annihilation of American middle class went out on the streets and occupied Wall Street in a peaceful protest accomplishing a whole lot of not much at all. Iron Council’s Ori is one of such idealists who realizes peaceful resistance and activism and other ways of affecting change by working within the system are only effective when said system isn’t completely broken. He is tired talking about how bad things are and he wants to start doing something to change it. He seeks out and ultimately joins a fringe resistance group which seeks to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the government by force. And so begins his ascension through the ranks of New Corbuzon’s most infamous terrorist cell. While he thinks that their cause is just and while he finds camaraderie among his fellow freedom fighters he is plagued by doubts and appalled by the amount of collateral damage his group is causing.

Parallel to Ori’s story we also get to follow Judah Low, a restless adventurer and a master golemist who, spurned by the sad state of affairs and social unrest in New Corbuzon sets out on a journey to find the titular Iron Council. Said council is a New Corbuzon legend: a symbol of equality, solidarity and a big middle finger directed at the corrupt government. The city’s most ambitious railway project was hijacked when a group of low wage rail workers and remade slaves rebelled against poor work conditions, overthrew their taskmasters, defeated the City militia army sent to quell their rebellion then stole the train and much of the rails driving off to some unknown lands and creating a society of their own. It became New Corbuzon’s Tiananmen Square – an uplifting symbol to the people and a shameful embarrassment to the government which officially claims it never happened. If anyone can find this legendary secret commune, it is Judah Low because he was once counted among the council’s leaders and political instigators. He hopes that by finding council and convincing it to come back, he can help to unite New Corbuzon’s fractured underclasses and create a spark of an open rebellion.

One can’t help but notice that the novel is somewhat topical. The book was published in 2004, but Miéville seems to have successfully tapped into the global sense of dissatisfaction regarding the income inequality and accumulation of wealth and power that started to skew former democracies toward oligarchic like systems. That pressure has later erupted into events like the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and myriad of other bigger and smaller inequality related protests. Reading the novel now, one can see that the author has extrapolated on these notions and created microcosm exploration of social upheaval brought about by crushing inequality. Granted, we are talking about a revolution in a steam-punk/fantasy pseud-democratic-but-not-really New Corbuzon here. A city populated by frog-men, bird-men, sentient cacti in which corrupt judges can order your left ass-cheek to be magically fused with an angry porcupine as a punishment for littering. It’s not like this is a strong one to one metaphor for something particular. But it does make you think.

It does put you in the mind of the people involved in such revolts. It does a great job showing both the hope and hopelessness of fighting against a seemingly immovable unjust system. And the ending is as poignant and as fitting the story as it is unsatisfying. But most importantly it is rather unique, and very different from all the other novels in the same series. It is probably the most mature of the three Bas Lag books I have read so far, and one with a most diverse cast of characters. It is one of the few SF/Fantasy titles I have read this year that features not just prominent gay but also bisexual characters. Especially that last group has virtually zero representation in popular culture, and especially in SF and Fantasy. So it is nice to see Miéville making bisexuality the least interesting aspect of a vibrant and dynamic protagonist such as Judah Low.

I think Iron Council is definitely worth revisiting Bas Lag universe, even if you are getting tired of the setting. I don’t know if this can be said about all Miéville’s books set in the universe but Iron Council was definitely not an attempt to grind that commercial sweet spot. Personally I prefer his one of SF excursions like City and the City or Embassytown but I must admit that this novel might be the most serious and thoughtful I have seen him so far.

The interesting question is: can you write a really good fantasy novel? The answer is yes, you can. It’s been done. Tolkien spent most of his career doing just that. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was his Magnum Opus, and the sheer amount of love and hard work that went into it clearly shows. It became a huge, paradigm changing phenomenon, precisely because it was unique in its own right. Therefore the recipe for great Fantasy is not to crib from Tolkien but try to imitate his technique. You start with a concept and build your setting around it. Tolkien decided to frame his universe around Germanic, Saxon and Norse mythology and folklore. If you want to write good Fantasy you should do exactly that: pick a framework (be it mythology, philosophy or both) and build your setting around it. And he did a really, really good job fleshing out that mythology and making it his own, so the further you get away from it, the better.

Here is an idea crazy enough to work: a Fantasy setting framed around Aristotelian metaphysics. Let’s assume that Earth is the center of the universe and the sun, the moon at the stars rotate around it floating not in vacuum but in a celestial medium known as Aether which is considered the fifth element. Most of earthly matter is composed not of atoms but out of the four remaining elements (earth, water, fire and air) mixed in differing proportions. Nature is theological and there is inherent purpose in all things. The elements coalesce into mountains, lakes and precious metals depending on local circumstances to fulfill one of the finite number of ideal forms which exist separately from matter but is expressed in material substances.

Aristotelian Geo-centrism as core of the setting.

Now that we have this setting, lets add a dash of Hagelian philosophy and say that human mind can influence the form and thus indirectly manipulate the matter around them. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that if you get sick, it is not because of some virus or bacteria, but because of a mental defect. If you are depressed, plagued by guilt, doubt or madness your body reflects this and you shrivel up and suffer all kinds if ailments. Conversely, if you are confident and believe in yourself your body will over time conform to your self-image and you will grow taller, stronger an more beautiful. Those with exceptional strength of personality will actually radiate outwards and force itself upon those around you. So for example, if you believe yourself to be an exceptional leader you will likely posses an aura that will influence those around you to be more disciplined, obedient and competent at their jobs. If you consider yourself an exceptional warrior those who fight along your side will become more adept, accurate and deadly. Some individuals are born with a special affinity to one of the elements or substances. For example those with affinity to air can build flying ships by imbuing wood and metals with their favored element making them float above the air. Those with somatic affinity can become clerics who can heal you by laying on hands and willing your body to mend. Few truly exceptional individuals have such strong auras that they can influence hearts and minds (and therefore bodies) of entire nations. Thus those living under the rule of a dour hedonistic despot will over time become humorless and selfish themselves, while those serving a happy benevolent master will thrive.

There are air ships and celestial ships that can sail through the aether.

If you think this is kinda interesting, you should keep in mind I did not make this up. This is more or less the setting of Other Songs (Inne Pieśni) by Jacek Dukaj. If there was such a thing as Hard Fantasy this would be it. It is not an easy reading book, and the setup I concisely described above is slowly unveiled and explained over lose to 800 pages. It is part an adventure novel, part fantasy, part alternate history, part philosophical discussion of the Aristotelian/Hegelian philosophy.

Other Songs – Inne Pieśni, cover.

The action takes place in the alternate version of our Earth with alternate physics. Alternate histories often have a clearly defined breaking point after which everything changes. In Other Songs such an event was emergence of Alexander the Great who is described as the world’s first kratistos (from Greek word meaning strongest, noblest, most excellent) whose force of will could influence entire nations. After Alexander there were many others: immensely powerful and influential men and women who have evolved to being more or less living gods. After few centuries of turmoil the earth was neatly divided between the winners. They uneasily coexist constantly scheming, plotting and maneuvering for advantageous position. When a kratistos becomes overly ambitious others may unite and conquer him/or her for his territories. Whenever new kratistos is born he or she must find a niche somewhere in between the existing powers or perish.

The protagonist of the novel is Hieronim Barabelek, an aristocrat and former military strategist whose greatest claim to fame was a heroic last stand against the armies of the Rasputin like kratistos of the Ural mountains known as The Sorcerer. Unfortunately when The Sorcerer himself took the field Barabelek’s will was broken and his army fell. His mind and spirit broken, he shriveled up to half the size and became sickly, shy and melancholic recluse. His marriage falls apart, but years later he is reunited with his children. Barabelek’s son turns out to be an ambitious young man who intends to follow in his fathers’ footsteps and wants to learn military doctrine from the living legend that is his father.

Barabelek is keenly aware of the fact he is no longer the man his son admires. However new responsibilities as a father, and his son ambition influence him to come out of his shell and start taking new risk. Thus he agrees to travel to Africa to take part in a kind of an aristocratic safari cum hunting expedition into uncharted wilderness that exists beyond the civilized form and outside the sphere of influence of any kratistos. In the heart of Affrica the matter seems to lose its form, giving birth to all kinds of chimeras and monsters from flying snakes and rainbow colored zebras to absurd vicious predators made solely out of blood and fire. The true nature of this place is a mystery and a subject of intense theological debate, especially since it is impossible to chart or explore. The deeper you go the more influenced you become by the broken form of the place. Your fingers may fuse together, your teeth may become glass, your eyes may evaporate, etc.. Some say that at the very heart of this disruption lies impossible city populated by impossible creatures. Unfortunately those who went that deep came back irreversibly wrapped and were driven mad so their reports are less than reliable.

Alternate Cover

Barabelek’s expedition goes further than most, and what he finds there changes him forever. Unraveling the mystery of the schism that warps the reality in the heart of Afferica becomes his obsession, which takes him to the moon (the domain of a banished ancient and immensely powerful kratistos) and back. He eventually figures it out…

[SPOILERS]

It’s aliens. But not regular aliens as we know them, because in Dukaj’s world such aliens simply can’t exist. Stars are simply spheres of Aether that rotate around earth – there are no alien planets or solar systems. So real aliens can only come from a alternate reality with alternate physics. The alien minds, much like the human minds influence form of the matter around them, and force it to conform to their alien standards which appear to be incompatible with ours. Their very presence causes our reality to break apart, and wrap in impossible way until it becomes their reality. Almost by definition these aliens are impossible to understand, because understanding them would mean assuming their form, and thus leaving our universe behind.

I’m not saying it’s aliens but… It’s aliens.

Barabelek discovers that the Affrican phenomenon was caused by a small landing party, and that there has been a similar incursion on the moon many decades before. Lunar astrologists have been tracking the movements of the stars, and by observing deviations of their orbits they have theorized that there is an entire alien invasion fleet sitting somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn. How do you fight reality wrapping aliens? Conventional ways have proven to be inefficient. For example using artillery to destroy the wrapped Affrican jungle failed because cannon balls would turn into birds or spiders, or sand before hitting the ground. The only reliable way to combat the threat seems to be to force our own form and order onto them. This is something only a powerful kratistos could do. But a single kratistos would likely be swallowed up by the invasion fleet without much hassle. So Earth’s only hope for survival is to unite all the world leaders, pack their armies onto air-ships that can sail through the aether and wage war in space, which was never done before. Especially since most of said leaders do not believe the threat is real. Who better to convince them otherwise through plot, intrigue, assassinations and political machinations than brilliant strategist Barabelek. That is, if he can actually get his shit together.

Dukaj’s alternate universe is strikingly original and just bristling with interesting ideas. Just to give you a taste, here are some notable highlights from the novel:

• The moon (just like other celestial bodies) is made mostly out of Aether and Pyr (the fire element) and as such would be uninhabitable. In fact, under normal circumstances things would simply fall of the surface of the moon because gravity is always toward the center of creation. Life exists there only thanks to the influence the banished kratistos Illia, who not only was able to reverse the gravity but made it possible for plants and animals to thrive there. Still, it remains a harsh and unforgiving place. Everything, including the air you breathe is infused with the fire element. So every breath scorches your lungs, everything you touch burns your skin and you can’t even quench your thirst because water will burn just as much. You eventually get used to it, but it is not fun.
• Some of the natives of the moon are born with the affinity to the flame element, and their very blood is infused with it. When they get angry, they pretty much become the Human Torch from Fantastic Four. They are the warrior caste, and they make their battle armors from pure Aether. The main property of the fifth element is that it is in constant motion, so the armor is basically a collection of interlocking plates and ball bearings fine tuned to orbit each other. These armors can be used for defense or offense when the warriors kick the Aether in their gauntlets into higher orbits turning them into chainsaw like weapons.
• One of the many places Barabelek visits during his journeys is a floating city. It was created by a kratistos who was born at the intersection of two major world powers and felt squeezed out by the neighbors. When he hit puberty he ripped out his home town and surrounding fields and villages from the ground Dalaran style and relocated it into the middle of the ocean. Some of the men and women who are born in his aura develop extreme affinity to the air element to the point that their bodies become lighter than the air. The locals call them angels, and they commonly wear silver breast plates, or chains to weight them down so that they don’t get blown off the island by wind.
• How do the characters know The Sorcerer has arrived in town? The spiders start building their webs in the shape of pentagrams.
• Sea battle with a Kraken. Yep. This novel has it.
• Dukaj describes a fight between an Ares (a person with a strong warrior aura) and a Nimrod (strong hunter aura) and it’s absolutely ridiculously brutal. Back in 2006 I reviewed a silly fighting game called Toribash in which the players can mutually dismember each other if they play it right. It’s kinda like that. It’s over in seconds, and there are body parts all over the floor. It’s also worth mentioning that the combat is kindof a big deal and involves rather important characters who got manipulated by bigger players. It’s one of those “oh, crap – I can’t believe this is happening” moments.
• The novel ends with a classic Dukaj mind-fuck. It both gives you closure, but at the same time is open to interpretation. It will definitely leave you scratching your head, and trying to work out the staggering implications of what just happened on the last page.

Other Songs is nothing short of exceptional. Dukaj is primarily Hard SF writer and it shows. The scope and amount of research that must have went into this novel is staggering. I often praised the author for not coddling his readers and expecting them to have not only basic knowledge of basic science and technology, but to be at least moderately genre savvy and fluent in the SF jargon. In Inne Pieśni however he makes sure his setting is adequately explained. There are lengthy digressions and/or dialogues which the characters study or discuss the unique metaphysics of their universe. The style is somewhat reminiscent of Stephenson’s Anathem with it’s scholarly dialogues, but Dukaj is harder and more unforgiving on his characters. His universe is cold, unforgiving and full of treachery. It’s almost as if Anathem and Game of Thrones had a love child.

The novel is pretty hard to pigeon hole and classify. I opened this review by discussing the Fantasy genre because personally I think that’s where it belongs. However it’s not very clear cut. After all, the book contains aliens and at least one large space battle which you could argue are very much SF topics. I guess it depends on how you actually define science fiction. For me the genre has science in the name for a reason. Seeing how Other Songs does not actually involve any real science, but rather a very well executed and interesting system of metaphysics, I’d argue it belongs firmly in the Fantasy setting.

As far as I know there is no English version of the novel as of yet. But if you can read Polish, I highly recommend it. This book will change the way you view Fantasy forever.

Grass Cover

Grass is a planet, one of a dozen or so human colonies scattered throughout the galaxy. It is a rather backwards, provincial and mostly rural world with little to no industry. It’s only major city is clustered around the space port, which sees a good deal of off-world traffic because the planet is a convenient half-way point on some major trade routes. Outside the port and the commerce going on in the city, little else happens on Grass. The planet is ruled by a handful of aristocratic families who seem to be obsessed with fox hunts. Only the animals they hunt are only foxes in name. They are some indigenous alien life form, as are the hounds and the mounts ridden to the hunt. Little is known about the customs of these people, because they are reclusive and xenophobic and distrustful of foreigners.

For many generations the aristocrats of grass covered planet has been left to its own devices. Now however an incurable and deadly plague is sweeping all across the human colonies decimating their population. The authorities try to keep it secret to prevent panic, while frantically searching for a cure. The plague seems to be everywhere, except Grass. In fact there is some evidence that infected travelers who had a lay-over on Grass were mysteriously cured of the disease.

An ambassador is sent to the planet under some official pretext, with a secret mission to investigate the matter. He and his family are to infiltrate the aristocratic circles, find out what is known about the plague, and try to convince the leaders of the planet to allow a scientific investigation that could help develop a cure if one exists. Because the aristocrats of the Grass are known to be avid hunters, the Terran authorities pick a family of former Olympic equestrian athletes in the hopes they can find common ground with the locals in their shared love of horseback riding.

This proves to be a complete misunderstanding. The Grassian “mounts”, “hounds” and “foxes” turn out to be nothing like their counterparts from Earth. The hunt is more than mere entertainment, but rather a ritual experience that is fundamental to the Grassian culture, but at the same time deeply unsettling to Terrans. The relationship between the huntsmen and their hunting “animals” is strange and troubling to say the least. What is even more worrisome is the mystery that surrounds the creatures that are being hunted?

The Terran ambasados realize that Grass holds more than one secret… But perhaps these secrets are connected. For example, there are ruins of an advanced ancient alien civilization lost in the grasses. Those aliens died off long before first humans made planet fall. Similar ruins have been found on few other planets, but the ones on Grass are unique because they contained alien remains… All mangled, broken, dismembered and scattered throughout the city. Whatever killed them may now pose a threat to human colonists.

I must admit that I really love this type of stories with in which you the setting itself is a part of a big mystery. Tepper masterfully teases the reader with little details of the Grassian way of life without ever revealing too much until it is dramatically appropriate. It is one of those settings that is best approached with little to no prior knowledge. Unfortunately I might have already gave you a pretty good idea of what exactly is going on on Grass with my Monday post. So you should… You know… Retroactively, un-read it before picking up this book.

Actually no, that’s not accurate. What I might have let on in my last post is merely the first reveal in the book, and there are several layers to the mystery. So even if you have figured out the “mounts” are more than meets the eye, you are still only a little bit ahead of the game.

Besides, the book is worth reading just for the character alone. Majorie, the protagonist is wonderfully fleshed out, nuanced and flawed characters I have encountered lately. She is a passionate, strong, drive, ambitious and independent woman who desperately tries to keep her family together, even though her husband is unfaithful and abusive and her children are selfish and ungrateful. She plays the role of submissive, understanding wife and mother, but on the inside she is growing angry and resentful. Then regrets and feels guilty about that. She is this sort of wonderful boiling cauldron of conflicting emotions: love, anger, resentment, guilt, duty, religious devotion, etc.. Tepper just puts the lid on, cranks up the heat. You expect Majorie to explode under the pressure at any moment. But she never does. And when the shit hits the fan, she blossoms into an amazing leader who can make hard decisions under pressure, and lead by example by risking her own life for the greater good without a moment of hesitation.

In a way Grass reminds me of The Sparrow. It has the same slow cooking reveal, and similar focus on introspective character development. In fact both books feature characters who are devout Catholics undergoing a crisis of faith, though they deal with it in different ways and for different reasons. So if you liked Marry Doria Russels novel, chances are you will enjoy Grass very much. If you didn’t, this novel might still appeal to yo because it is sufficiently different both in tone as in topic matter. In either case, I highly recommend picking it up.

To put it bluntly, Tau Zero is no more and no less than “Ram Scoop: The Novel”. That’s what it is about, and that’s it’s claim to fame. It is basically a few hundred page long geek out session on the topic of Busard Engines. Without it, Niven would probably never write his Known Space novels, Vinge would never embark on his Zones of Thought trilogy, Reynolds would never write House of Suns, and etc.. This book can be directly credited for making the term “ramjet” a permanent mainstay of science fiction parlance.

Tau Zero Cover

The plot is astonishingly simple: it is near future and humanity is slowly colonizing the galaxy using ramjets to ferry explorers to distant habitable planets. The crews travel awake, relying on the time dilation that occurs at relativistic speeds to make the trip manageable. On one such long distant jaunt something goes terribly wrong, and the deceleration subsystem stops working. The ship is unable to slow down, misses its target destination and keeps on accelerating, hurling towards the unknown while decades and then centuries pass in the outside world.

If you are a bit shaky on general relativity and don’t really grok the whole time dilation concept, don’t worry. Anderson explains it in excruciating detail. By the time you reach the final page, you will know just about anything there is to know about the physics of near light speed travel. That and you will posses almost an intimate level of knowledge about the internal workings of Busard Ramjets. To be frank, those parts of the book were actually rather fascinating and enjoyable. He waxes romantic about the properties of the Tau coefficient, the special relativity. He beautifully describes his pet ship hurling through space and spends many paragraphs musing about the Doppler shifted star-scape the crew can see from the view ports. All of that is great. The problems start when that pesky crew decides to do or talk about things other than science of space flight. Unfortunately, they do a lot of that.

Artist rendition of Leonora Christine, the ramjet from the novel

The tricky part of the scenario Anderson came up with, is that the discussion of the human condition is almost unavoidable. The crew is trapped on a rogue spaceship that is unable to stop and is constantly accelerating and increasing the time dilation. They have to come to terms with the fact that even if they manage to somehow repair their engines, they may no longer have a planet to come back to because eons would have passed in the outside world. This, as you can imagine is a rather bitter pill to swallow for anyone. Anderson tries to describe the ways in which the space travelers may choose to cope with such a predicament.

Judging from the way Anderson describes interpersonal relationships and romantic engagements, one begins to suspect that he might have never actually observed real people interacting “in the wild”. His characters are violently uninteresting and insist on having abysmally boring, robotic conversations about their love lives whenever they are not busy telegraphing sadness and despair. You just know that Anderson’s heart is not in it though. He writes the human bits because he has to – there is a rule somewhere that your novel has to have human characters that readers need to be able to relate to. But it is painfully obvious that the one and only character he really cares about is Leonora Christine – the ship itself.

Its like: “Guys, guys, guys! Lenora just flew through a g-type main sequence star and annihilated an entire solar system, and the crew didn’t even notice. How awesome is tha… I mean, everyone was sad. And that one guy was upset because his girlfriend is cheering. And that other woman is depressed because like religion and stuff… Look, can we talk about how awesome it is that the ship just fucking punched through a star? Like seriously!”

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only a little bit. It’s not that his characters are boring because they talk about science. You can write really compelling characters that never talk about anything else. They are boring specifically because Anderson makes a herculean effort to have them talk about relationships, hopes, dreams and desires. But it never seems real or relocatable. Whenever he tries to wrap his words around a human emotion, he hits the uncanny valley big time.

Perhaps it is Anderson’s writing style. Is awkward, ponderous and hollow most of the time. His narrator’s voice is more suited to describing epic events in a detached, clinical manner than to conveying human feelings. The only brief flights of fancy happen when he talks about astronomy or science. That said, he is really good at explaining the physics and mathematics behind the ramjet function in very accessible and layman friendly way. So if you are into that sort of thing, you will enjoy bits and pieces of this novel. Just make sure you set your expectations low in terms of interpersonal drama and suspense. There isn’t any.

Still, it is a worthwhile read for the educational value alone. That and it is a classic that inspired many writers, and made the Busard ramjet to be one of science-fiction’s most beloved sub-light propulsion systems.

On the other hand, sometimes you read a premise of a story and it is so mind-bogglingly amazing your pants literally fall of on the spot. Please keep in mind that there is nothing sexual in this sort of de-pantsment. It’s just that certain types of awesomeness are simply best faced in your underwear. Bit Rot by Charles Stross is exactly that kind of a story. Let me tell you just how awesome it is.

Bit Rot is a story:

1. about sentient androids (descendants of now extinct humanity)
2. on a relativistic deep space jaunt toward distant stars
3. and suddenly there is a zombie outbreak
4. and it is also ultra hard SF with like science in it

If your pants are still on, you are probably made out of stone, or an alien replicant of some sort who does not appreciate the “high-culture” of the internet. Charlie Stross however definitely does. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the man is one of us, seeing how he has a real life publisher and actual genuine book deals. But the stuff he writes sometime is so much in sync with the collective wants and dreams of the netizens it is not even funny.

Image somewhat unrelated but very on topic. By ~OSCAR-N.

A lesser writer would take the above premise and play it for jokes, but Stross takes it absolutely seriously. Not only does he develop a plausible explanation how a “zombie” style plague could break out amongst synthetic arndroid colonists, but he also confidently ties it into one of his book continuities. The story is actually supposed to be taking place in the Saturn’s Children universe. Unfortunately I have never read that book, mainly because of it’s cover. No, seriously I have no clue what his publisher was thinking but it made me avoid it. I generally make a point of not buying books with gratuitous amount of cleavage on the cover. But after reading Bit Rot I might need to re-consider because the setting actually sounds intriguing. Either way, the short story stands alone quite well and you actually do not need to have any knowledge of the novel to fully enjoy it.

It is distant future, and humanity is now long gone. The only thing we have left behind is the sprawling support system that is run by sentient androids of all shapes and sizes. After the last human died, instead of closing shop the care-takers decided to just continue doing their thing. There was no robot uprising or mass genocide mind you. Humans simply got fat, lazy and complacent and eventually didn’t even really feel like getting out of the house to reproduce so they have faded away. The androids were designed to act and think much like humans so that they could better empathize with their masters and so they inherited a lot of our good and bad traits. Some are nice, some are jerks and etc. They still remember humans quite fondly and refer to them as their “ancestors”.

In general their bodies are self-repairing and they have almost indefinite lifespans and as such they are much more suited to very long, interstellar jaunts at relativistic speeds. The story is about two “sisters” who sign up for one of such trips, mostly to get away from their rich, spoiled arrogant “mother”. I’m putting these words in quotations because they are all robots, so they don’t reproduce biologically. The protagonists consider themselves “sisters” because their personalities have been based on the same template. A rich Earth socialite forked them off in order to live vicariously through their adventures. But they got tired living in her shadow and booked a one way trip into the unknown to forge their own destiny far away from home. En route there shit goes terribly wrong (or terribly right, depending on whether you are a character or a reader of the story).

It has been quite a while since I have seen an original take on zombies. While zombies in space have been done before, I don’t think I have ever seen a zombie story that involved androids and no humans. Neither have I ever seen hard science used to explain the plague. Bit Rot has probably the best, and most plausible kind of zombies out there. My only complaint about the story is that it is too short. Stross ends it just when things start to get really interesting, leaving the rest to the imagination of the readers. I would love to see it fleshed out to a full length novel, a movie or a video game. Anything really, because the premise is amazingly awesome.

If you have a few free moments, definitely check this one out. Good news is that the full text of the story is available online. The formatting is not the best though, so I recommend running it through Instantpaper, Readability or Pocket to get the enhanced readable version instead.

Recently, Stross collaborated with another author I like: Cory Doctorow, and published a jointly written novel titled Rapture of the Nerds. I read it weeks ago, and have been mulling over a review ever since then. It’s probably one of the hardest reviews I have ever written, because no matter how much I try I can’t seem to stretch “meh…” into a thousand word essay.

Rapture of the Nerds Cover

It’s not that the book is bad. It is perfectly decent novel. In fact, if you read the synopsis it is the kind of book I like: near future, post singularity novel about baseline human interactions with “weakly god-like” entities living in the Marioshka cloud built around the sun. I honestly don’t know how it is even possible to mess something like that up. And yet here we are.

Never mind, scratch that last thought. To be fair the authors did not mess anything up. They did not drop the ball at any point. I guess I’m just kinda disappointed they did not deliver a fancy slam dunk but instead went for a classy but less impressive 3 point shot. Are these basketball metaphors doing anything for you? Because I have no idea what I’m actually talking about. Those are basketball terms, right? Or is slam dunk a hockey thing? I’d google it but that would actually require me giving a fuck about sports, but unfortunately I’m all out of fucks to give for the week. So you guys will just have to deal with it.

I guess my problem with the book is that it is just perfectly unremarkable. I found it enjoyable, but about on the same level as one enjoys plain oatmeal. It’s tasty, filling and nutritious but not necessarily something you would want to write home about. There is nothing in that novel that either Stross or Doctrow haven’t covered somewhere else in much better way.

What does it mean when you put down a book and have nothing to say about it (either negative or positive)? Does it mean that the author has succeed creating something that is perfectly acceptable? Or does it mean that he or she failed at stimulating your imagination and making you think about things.

Maybe the book is not actually that bad. Maybe it’s me. I admit that I hard really hard time getting into it. Normally I devour most of the stuff by Stross or Docrtorov. I like the writing style of both authors and this book is something in between, which is still quite agreeable. But I just never got to that point where you can’t put the book down because you need to know what happens next. I was always just mildly disinterested in the story: just not enough to stop reading. I think it might be because I just could not stand the protagonist.

And no, I didn’t mind the fact that he/she changed gender like five times throughout the book. That I actually found interesting and unique about the character. It’s a pity that these gender swaps were involuntary though – it would be probably much more engaging to have a story told from the point of view of a truly gender fluid character. I dislike Huw Jones for an entirely different reason: (s)he is a closed minded, technophobic, prejudiced misanthrope who chooses to live a neo-ludite life in a house without electricity. Huw hates the cloud with a passion, despises and distrusts any kind of artificial intelligence and considers anything transhuman to be an disgusting abomination. In other words, Huw is a person I have almost nothing in common, and can’t seem to relate to at all. If we met in real life we would probably instantly develop deep dislike and disdain for each other.

Sometimes you find books that have magnificent bastard anti-hero protagonists who you just love to hate. Unfortunately this is not one of such books. Huw is just lousy, resentful, whiny jerk from the very start of the novel to the very end. I guess the fact that the protagonist who hates all technology gets implicated into, and becomes a major player in a high stakes intrigue concocted by the cloud entities is supposed to be ironic and funny. But it isn’t. Huw is dragged by force from one fun locale to another, and the authors fill his/her life with all kinds of colorful explosions of mind bending and reality altering clarktech which (s)he hates with a passion of thousand suns. Huw whines, complains, then begrudgingly learns to use technology to advance the plot, then discards it with disgust and goes back to being technophobe until the next time. It’s like pulling teeth really – the shtick gets old after the first chapter, and you really want the character to finally get with the program and stop being so backwards. But that never happens.

As a result, it hardly ever feels like the protagonist has any agency. People just drag Huw around, maneuver him/her into an advantageous plot position and just wait until (s)he stops whining. You can of course write a novel about someone with little to no agency, but hat requires a different plot structure. The plot of Rapture always hinges on Huw doing something (s)he is not very keen on, and a lot of the conflict is just watching him/her stall and complain a lot before caving in.

The other thing that slightly bothered me is that the authors got things a little bit too right. For example I think that their the depiction of the cloud is just spot on. It’s basically the Internet as we know it right now, but with people living there. It’s kinda like I always imagined these sort of networks to be like. But Stross and Corry make it extra shitty to make Huw hate it all that more. And that kinda kills it. The glorious cyberspace to which chosen ones ascend to become “weakly god-like” super-entities turns out to be a masturbatory shit hole populated by jerks, and focused on bullshit idle discussions. The whole place is like a message board thread, 7 pages past Goodwin’s Law and still going strong.

Same goes for the depiction of the future of United States. It was both depressing and little too much on the nose. Apparently after all sensible people migrated to the cloud the country was overrun by religious wingnuts. So the nation is an ecological disaster zone, polluted by toxic waste, almost entirely radioactive and overrun by continent sized mutated killer-ant colony. The survivors live under the boot of crazy Evangelical theocracy which is secretly ruled by hedonistic sex cults. Clever? Yes. Accurate? Ouch, its almost too much.

The sharp satire Stross and Doctorow deliver in this novel hit too close to home for me. I can see the humor in it, but it just made me sad. They take all the things I love and enjoy and piss on them relentlessly and with reckless abandon. They rip apart the internet culture, they use Huw to ruthlessly rip on blind technophilia and reckless transhumanism, and they depict the country where I currently reside as a hell hole beyond help and any hope of redemption. It kinda hurts… But on the other hand, it is mostly just lighthearted ribbing, and it lacks impact. If they really leaned into their punches they could have easily ripped my hard up and made the experience somewhat cathartic. Sometimes anguish is good. But Rapture of the Nerds always pulls it’s punches and delivers nothing but mild annoyance.

Sometimes you will read a book, and you just fall in love with the setting. You actually want to go and live in that universe and you start writing notes for a FATE campaign using that setting. This is not one of such books. Sometimes a setting is so twisted, and repulsive that it has the opposite effect: you just love to hate it. And you also start trying to figure out how to convince your friends to play a game based on it. Rapture of the Nerds falls somewhere in between these sweet spots: the setting is kinda cool, but kinda shitty at the same time. It has cool elements, but nothing that would really make it stand out.

The end result of all of this is a book that just doesn’t have all that much of an impact. It’s almost as if the authors couldn’t agree on the tone. Sometimes the book is positively wacky, sometimes it becomes sharp, almost mean-spirited satire. Other times it tries to play serious for a bit and goes for plot twists and late reveals. You will read it, shrug, put it back on the shelf and likely never think about it again. Which is kinda sad considering what it could have been.

There are books that simply tell a great story in a very compelling way like Lord of Light, The Sparrow or City at the End of Time. Only Forward is not one of these books.

Sometimes you read a book, and you hate every single page. That’s what happened to me when I read Capacity. Only Forward was not like that either. It is something else altogether.

Only Forward Cover

Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith is probably a book unlike anything else you have read before. And I don’t mean that it is an experimental, odd-ball performance piece like House of Leaves. It is a very traditional, old school novel. The strangeness comes from the way it is plotted. Not necessarily the plot itself but the way in which it unwinds. And therein lies the difficulty of reviewing it. The more I tell you about it, the less you are going to enjoy it. In a way, this book is all about the journey you take with the narrator through weird twist and turns the plot takes. It’s all about marveling how the story flips and flops around every few chapters keeping you guessing as to what exactly is the whole thing about.

I purchased the book on an impulse. It is yet another one of those times when Amazon recommendations came through for me, providing an astonishingly accurate recommendation. So in a way I went into it blind, which is probably the best way to go. For a regular novel, I could tell you the genre, the setting and give you some idea of the story without spoiling anything. But this doesn’t necessarily work for Only Forward because, true to it’s title, the book has this kind of forward momentum that takes it away from the original premise very quickly.

It starts as sort of a noir detective story set in an odd SF setting: a sprawling futuristic city that is divided into self-sufficient, self governing neighborhoods that cater to very narrow special interest groups. There is neighborhood for people who like to live in total silence where noise is outlawed, one which is populated solely by cats, one which is a big country club, one which is a lawless hell-hole where rival gangs can have all-out drug wars. The narrator seems to be some sort of a detective who gets hired to find a missing person…

Unfortunately the narrator, who also happens to be the protagonist, is completely unreliable. He constantly lies about his past, only to reveal the truth much later. He omits important bits of the story so that he won’t have to reveal more things about himself and he fully admits it. You quickly realize he is not really a detective at all, and the case was given to him because he possesses a very special set of skills. What these skills are, and why they are important for this case? Well, he won’t reveal that until much later in the story. But for the time being he keeps doing detective like things, chasing leads, investigating and etc…

Then the bottom of the story falls out, and it turns into a rescue expedition into a very peculiar, separationist neighborhood that cut itself off from the rest of the city and forbids any communication in and out of it. Then as soon as you come to terms it is no longer a detective story, it switches gears again and starts messing with the genre and the setting itself. Every time you think you figured out what this book is actually about, Michael Marshal Smith suddenly switches gears and goes somewhere else entirely. But the consistency of writing and narration ties it all together so neatly you barely notice when these shifts happen.

It is a neat book, full of little surprises. Once it is all said and done, it might seem a bit underwhelming. The bits near the end of the book which reveal why the protagonist is so “special” didn’t really wow me that much. It’s probably because I expected something more science, whereas Smith went more the fiction route. But I found the storytelling entertaining and engaging enough to keep reading till the very end. Smith tells the story in light heated, witty way with his tongue permanently planted in his cheek. The world he creates is wonderfully wacky and silly but he never really seems to cross over into full slapstick or satire. It’s one of these books that probably won’t make you laugh out loud, but it will keep you smirking as you read it.

It is not mind blowing, life changing or anything like that. But it is a fun read. If you in the market for something to cleanse your pallet between reading hard SF or serious heart wrenching stories this is probably a good book to pick up.