The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Audible was pushing this novel at me for ages. I don’t remember why I eventually picked it up; it might have been on a two-for-one deal. Whatever the reason, it was there in my collection of audiobooks when I needed something to listen to — and I loved it almost from the first line.

This was Miller’s debut novel, originally published in 2011. It was hugely popular and I imagine many of you are familiar with it. It is a re-imagining of the story of Patroclus, the lover of the Greek hero Achilles, and his unbreakable relationship with that difficult hero of ancient myth. It is told in Patroclus’s voice, in first person, and the narrator is excellent, and fully captures the tone of the story.

Miller’s writing is stellar throughout. I tend to bounce off novels where the descriptive element feels overdone, as if the clever descriptions are the point of the story. Miller does not do that. Her descriptive power is amazing, always enhancing the story and not weighing it down.

I suspect we all already know how this story ends. I was curious throughout to see how Miller would handle it — and she found what felt like a culturally appropriate way to do so.

I do wish there had been a little more insight on why Achilles, as portrayed in this story, was so powerfully drawn to Patroclus. Despite this, I found The Song of Achilles to be an excellent novel and I highly recommend it, especially if you’re into Greek myth.

Back in 2020 I posted about space opera and Kate Elliott’s novel, Unconquerable Sun — which I highly recommended. It’s been a very long wait for the next book in the series, but I’m pleased to report that Furious Heaven was published last month in the USA and honestly, I think it’s even more impressive than book one.

I so admire the way Kate Elliott can imagine such a diversity of scenes and cultures, imbuing them with all the detail to make them feel real, while not bogging down the story with needlessly extended descriptions. But much more than that, her ability to create a wide variety of characters with complex internal lives is so impressive to me — and to do this in a wide-ranging novel that plays out on multiple stages from many points of view . . . well, simply put, this series deserves far more attention than it looks to have garnered so far.

I do wonder how much the list price of these novels has affected their renown. Tor puts high prices on their books — even the ebooks. Are most readers reluctant to spend $16 for a new novel? I’d really like to know, because if books sell well at that price, maybe I should be charging more for my own? 😉

For myself, I didn’t buy the print or the ebook edition. Instead, I used an Audible credit to get the audiobook version. The narration is very well done. That said, I suspect the story would be easier to follow in print — but if audio is your thing, go for it!

Below are affiliate links to Amazon, but you can find these books at your favorite bookstore or online vendor:
Unconquerable Sun
Furious Heaven

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

Audible has a lot of two-books-for-one-credit sales. These sales are always limited to a select list of titles, a circumstance that has the effect of encouraging me to pick up audiobooks I otherwise would never have thought to try. That’s how I happened to come across The Brothers.

The book is a joint biography of John Foster Dulles, secretary of state during the 1950s and his brother, Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence agency during the same period. The story it tells is both fascinating and horrifying as it details the arrogance of the Dulles brothers, and their determination to disrupt and destroy the governments of countries around the world. We’ve all heard stories of the CIA propping up dictators. This book goes into the details, exploring Foster Dulles’s hostility and calcified thinking, and Allen Dulles’s ill-conceived adventurism. The United States — and many other countries — are still suffering from the fallout of decisions made by these two men.

If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with this era of history, The Brothers might be for you. It’s an eye-opener.

I love audiobooks, because I can listen to them while doing chores around the house and garden — and there are always a lot of chores. Over the past couple of months I’ve mostly been listening to non-fiction. These are books on history and environment that really captured my attention:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
1493 by Charles C. Mann
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

For biology nerds, I can heartily recommend: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (about fungus), and the mind-blowing The Vital Question by Nick Lane, which looks in detail at his theory of how life got started on this planet — and possibly on others.

The two science fiction novels I’ve listened to are:

Semiosis by Sue Burke — a very smart and engaging story about colonizing and coming to understand the biology of an alien world.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — excellent narration and a very clever and entertaining hard science fiction novel about saving the world from a very unusual invasive species.

If you have any audiobook favorites, let me know!

This post first appeared in my September 9th newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two remarkable scientists and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s world, by Charles C. Mann, read by Bronson Pinchot.

I usually listen to audiobooks while doing chores. This is one of those audiobooks that inspires me to do more chores, just so I can listen to it.

The Wizard and the Prophet starts off by asking: Can our Earth support a population of ten billion people—a number we are predicted to reach before too many more years—and if so, how?

The book is structured around the competing philosophies of two twentieth-century scientists. Norman Borlaugh, who launched the “green revolution” represents the technological or “hard” path. William Vogt, whose philosophies still energize much of the conservation movement, represents the “soft” path. There are many subtleties, but the hard path generally involves large, expensive, earth-changing (or gene-changing) engineering, while the soft path involves adapting ourselves and our lifestyles to live gently with the natural world.

Charles C. Mann—author of 1491—is a fantastic writer. I especially enjoy the way he looks at each of his subjects in a historical context. He does not hide their faults, and he looks at both the positive and the negative aspects of their contributions to the world.

Mann also looks in detail at what he sees as the four key challenges of our future: food, water, energy, and climate change.

The book was first published at the start of 2018. Mann lays out the unknowns of climate change at that time, including the question of when we will begin to see direct and undeniable effects. Of course here in 2021, we are seeing those effects, and it’s up to us, as a society, to respond responsibly, to ensure a livable world for future generations.

This post first appeared in my August 12th newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

I think of my Puzzle Land novels as grimdark fiction. Wikipedia defines grimdark as “a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, or violent.” Stories of the Puzzle Lands probably falls at the lighter end of the grimdark spectrum. It’s meant to be darkly humorous. Nevertheless, there is a lot of spontaneous killing going on, among other things.

So what is the appeal of truly violent stories? Part of it’s the action, sure. And maybe there’s some satisfaction in seeing a protagonist ruthlessly take down anyone standing in the way. But it’s one thing for an author to set up bad guys/enemies/antagonists for the hero to mow down, and something else when the protagonist starts slaughtering innocent bystanders because it’s convenient. It’s as if no one’s life has value except the protagonist…or do I take my fiction too seriously? 🙂

Two titles have inspired these thoughts. The first is an Amazon Prime TV series called Hanna. I watched the first episode because I was bored. Honestly, it didn’t sound like something I would like—a teenage girl with extraordinary abilities is being hunted down by nefarious government forces—but from the first episode, I was hooked.

The show is brutal. It’s a coming-of-age science fiction thriller in which teenage Hanna fights (literally) to find a place for herself in the world. The character of Hanna is often emotionally flat, which feels appropriate, given her upbringing and experience.

The series is well-written, well-acted, and has a startlingly high body count. It’s usually guards and soldiers who die and no one stops to ask if they deserve it. But it’s that kind of show. If you’re into this sort of thing, I recommend it.

The second title is a debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. I think it’s fair to say this is a literary novel. It’s beautifully written, with fantastic descriptive passages of both nature and people. It’s set in the American west, as the transcontinental railroad is being built. The protagonist, Ming Tsu, is on a quest to kill everyone involved in the destruction of his marriage. Call it a grimdark western revenge fantasy.

The story follows Ming Tsu through three parts. In the first he’s traveling with a mysterious old man who is endowed with a supernatural ability that is very useful to a revenge-seeking gunfighter. In the second part Ming Tsu hooks up with more very strange characters with special abilities of their own, and in the third he is on his own again and experiences additional supernatural episodes. I don’t think the story entirely hangs together, and the ending is not what I would have chosen. Nevertheless, I recommend The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu as something different and fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing what Tom Lin does next.

This post was originally published in my February 18th newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the only way for me to find new science fiction was to visit the little Waldenbooks at Maui Mall. Two short shelves held the full selection of mass-market paperbacks—the only format I could afford. It took only a few minutes to peruse the titles. Very often, I came away with something excellent to read. One of those lucky finds was a novel called The Broken God by David Zindell. I loved this book enough to go on to read the rest of the trilogy. Sometime later, I happened to be talking to a friend when the subject of David Zindell’s work came up.

Him: “Have you read Neverness?

Me: “Well, uh, no…”

Him: “It takes place before The Broken God—and you have to read it. It’s one of my favorite books of all time!”

So of course I eventually hunted down a copy. I remember that I didn’t like it as much as the later books. But recently I had an urge to revisit the story world of Neverness and decided that this time I’d tackle the books in the proper order, starting with Neverness itself. An excellent decision!

Neverness is a long, complicated, truly amazing novel. It belongs in a class with Dune for the detail and originality of its world-building, and also because, like Dune, it is in large part a philosophical novel, concerned with ultimate questions and the place of humanity in the Universe—though of course the story includes conflict and action too.

The protagonist, Mallory Ringess, is a pilot in an order dedicated to seeking knowledge throughout the galaxy. In one-person lightships, these pilots use complex mathematics to navigate the “manifold,” allowing them to jump from star to star—not instantly, but within endurable timespans.

But Neverness is not concerned only with the future. A reconstructed ancient past also plays a large part in the story.

Mallory is a sympathetic character, though not entirely likable, and I think that’s why, on my long-ago first reading, I didn’t love this book as much as those that followed. Even so, the story is fascinating. And although Neverness was originally published in 1988, it rarely shows its age.

If you’re looking for a fast read, this isn’t it. But if what you enjoy is a deep dive into an enthralling, uncertain future, Neverness is for you. When you reach the last page, you’ll know you’ve been on a magnificent journey.

Neverness is available at Amazon. (affiliate link)

PS: reading the reviews at Amazon, this is either a love-it or hate-it book. 🙂

Optimal by JM Berger

“The truth is that reality is negotiated by consensus.” —Stanton Lime, in Optimal

For most of us, our lives are deeply entangled with our digital devices, especially our smartphones. Through text messages, social media, and email, our phones keep us connected to our social circles. Engage the right apps, and they can warn us of potential assaults on our personal accounts, nudge us awake in the morning, help us track what we eat during the day, encourage exercise if we’ve been sitting too long, recommend a running route–or a restaurant–and ensure we don’t forget about that critical meeting or a spouse’s birthday. Algorithms, and the prompts they generate, encourage us to act and interact. Some apps offer token rewards or praise for good behavior, others urge us to rate every place we visit. Our responses are observed, our behavior logged, and our preferences deciphered so that we can be presented with ever more customized options, offers, and personally tailored stories ranging from news to entertainment.

It’s a platform that relies on surveillance, feedback, and manipulation. The system is complex, but clumsy and disjointed too, making it vulnerable to bad actors. Alongside the activity of benign self-improvement apps and consumer-analysis bots, political factions wage propaganda wars, seeking to control what people perceive as “reality,” while inducing social antagonisms, illogical behavior, and ultimately, violence in the tangible world.

But what if cyberspace could be transformed into a unitary system–one not ruled by any human master afflicted with inevitable quirks and inherent bigotry, but overseen instead by a benign AI-based information dictatorship? Imagine an AI designed and trained to perfect the task of guiding us through each day, and shaping our perception of reality with the goal of optimizing both our lives, and the world we live in.

That’s the premise behind JM Berger’s debut novel, Optimal.

The future portrayed in Optimal has gone far beyond smartphones. It’s a world of ubiquitous surveillance, with every room, every building, every road, every vehicle, every individual around the globe continuously linked, via an array of sensors, into an advanced artificial intelligence known simply as the System.

The System sees through the eyes of every citizen, it detects their every physiological quirk–but this isn’t sinister. The System’s algorithms are only seeking to optimize day-to-day life for everyone. In the quasi-utopia of the city, happy citizens are guided through each day by friendly prompts that urge them to wake on time, to exercise, to take designated paths to work, to work well, and to eat at suggested restaurants where favorite drinks and appetizers await at an open table as they walk in the door–because the System knows each person so well, it can order for them. No decision-making required. There’s no need to worry about finances either. The System tracks personal funds, while prompting each citizen to live within their means.

No one thinks to object to the constant guidance. Why should they? With the System’s algorithms piloting every individual throughout each day, conflict has been eliminated, poverty is unknown, and everyone has plenty of time to hang out with their friends, or check into Social, or to explore the trusted information contained in Knowledge.

This is a different kind of human/machine teaming than we’re used to seeing. In Optimal, humanity has ceded authority to the System, and by doing so, has finally achieved global peace.

And yet Jack–an average guy who works as an accountant–isn’t quite happy. He feels unfulfilled, both in his relationships and in his working life. Jack flirts with the idea of ignoring his prompts, making his own decisions, finding a new lover and a new career. But surely the System knows what’s best for him?

And then, inexplicably, the System assigns Jack a new task, a very unusual task. Stanton Lime, the chief financial officer of a client corporation, has vanished and Jack is asked to determine whether or not the missing man has made off with corporate funds. Jack soon settles that issue, but the real mystery remains: With every aspect of society observed and recorded, how could anyone disappear?

Jack sets out to answer that question, but every discovery only expands the mystery, leading him to question how the System works, what its real purpose is, and what kind of society it has designed, given its task of keeping the peace.

As Jack’s perception of his world evolves, he’s no longer content with the pablum of constant input the System feeds into his eyes and ears:

He muted as many of the flags and notifications as possible, although they still danced around the periphery of his awareness as new information flowed in and piled up, waiting expectantly for his attention. Even the muted content seemed to press at him intangibly, like the effect of gravity on tides. A world of information just waiting until the mute expired, eagerly counting the seconds until its opportunity to pounce.

He wanted to scream, SHUT UP. How do you expect me to think?

But of course, no one expected him to think.

Jack is not alone in his quest to find the mysterious Stanton Lime. He has the help of friends, and of discontented corporate officer Megumi.

But coercion comes in many forms, and along the way he learns that the System has trained others to accept a very different version of reality. One such individual, in a poignant description of her early life, tells Jack:

What surrounds you defines you, defines your expectations, your perception of what is real and what is possible. It creates boundaries, walls of concrete, that have to be actively smashed, fought tooth and nail, even when you are small, even if your heart by its very nature is filled with color.

Jack is learning to smash those walls, to fight that fight, always wondering just how far he will be allowed to go.

Artificial intelligence, and our electronic assistants, can surely help to optimize our lives. But our entanglement with the digital world leaves us vulnerable to deception and manipulation–and more and more, it exposes us to the unexpected solutions sometimes reached through the opaque, inhuman calculations of artificial intelligence. Optimal is a brilliant exploration of the implications of ceding our personal responsibility and relying on algorithms to teach us how to live.

But more than that, it’s great storytelling.

Highly recommended. Optimal is available at Amazon. (paid link)

This post was originally published in my September 24th newsletter. It’s re-posted here with minor changes. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

Most readers, and writers too, have quirks when it comes to what they like, and I’m no exception. There are certain popular space opera tropes I tend not to favor:

1. Instantaneous (or at least very fast) travel between stellar systems via gates, or portals, or wormholes, or whatever. The distance between stars is vast. It’s really, really vast. It’s my personal quirk that I like to celebrate that fact, as anyone who’s read my far-future fiction will know.

2. Far-future monarchies/galactic empires. A great thing about the original Star Trek was that the writers thought we humans could do better, that we could “grow up” and not need to be ruled by queens and kings. I like to think so too, though I grant you, looking around at the world these days, it’s getting ever harder to hold on to that point of view.

3. Interstellar war between human cultures: because seriously, what are you fighting for? How many planets does anyone really need? Given that you command the energy-intensive ability to travel between the stars, surely you could employ some of that energy and ability to improving your home system instead of destroying other peoples’ lives? (I know. I’m an idealist at heart.)

All of this is background that’s necessary for you to know when I tell you that I recently finished the audiobook edition of a space opera with instantaneous travel between stellar systems, far-future monarchies, and interstellar war. Three strikes against it. Even so, I’m going to tell you, with enthusiasm, that it was BRILLIANT!

I’m talking about Kate Elliott’s newest novel, Unconquerable Sun — a gender-swapped far-future take on Alexander the Great. This novel is really well done on so many levels. Fantastic engaging characters, stellar writing, a riveting story — and the audiobook has excellent narration. I’m not going to review it for you, because this newsletter is already too long (and I’m lazy), but you’ll find an excellent write up at a blog called The Quill To Live.

Okay, the bad news: Unconquerable Sun came out this past July from Tor Books, and they’re asking $15 for the ebook and more for print. If you can bear that price, I hope you’ll give it a try. If you do, let me know what you think about it!

Here’s a roundup of three titles I recently recommended in my newsletter:

I almost never read horror. It’s just not my thing. But Stephen Graham Jones’s new novel The Only Good Indians received such excellent reviews that I couldn’t resist, and preordered it. It’s the story of four Blackfeet friends who grew up together and now find themselves paying in a shocking way for an incident that took place in their youth. It’s an engrossing story, with excellent characterizations.
Find it at Amazon (affiliate link) or at your favorite bookstore.

I also recommend Recursion, by Blake Crouch — a time-travel story with a unique-to-me twist. When someone goes back in time and changes the future, the original future is not lost, but continues to exist as “dead memories” in the minds of those affected by the change –memories that are less than real but not forgotten. Recursion starts off feeling like a standard thriller, but along the way it evolves into a complex, thoughtful, and fascinating read.
Find it at Amazon (affiliate link) or at your favorite bookstore.

And for audiobook fans…
Back in April I recommended the audiobook edition of River of Darkness by Buddy Levy, the story of conquistador Francisco Orellana’s voyage from the headwaters of the Amazon River, to the sea. Last month, I listened to Labyrinth of Ice, the story of the Greeley Polar Expedition of 1881 to 1884. It wasn’t until I was nearly done that I realized Buddy Levy had also authored this book. It’s another excellent story of exploration, endurance, and survival. Highly recommended.
Find it at Amazon (affiliate link) or at your favorite bookstore.