Planetside by Michael Mammay

Most of my audiobook listening time happens when I’m doing chores — yardwork, cooking, cleaning — dull stuff that I can do on autopilot while I’m focused on the story. So the ultimate compliment I can pay to an audiobook is that it inspired me to do all the chores I could think of! Michael Mammay’s debut novel, Planetside, did that for me.

On its surface, Planetside is science fiction — it’s a military novel set in and around an alien planet in a story world where interstellar travel is common — but change just a few elements and it might be set in Afghanistan. It’s structured as a mystery. A colonel, close to retirement, is sent to a remote planet to investigate the disappearance of a young officer. There are elements of at least a couple of classic novels that I won’t name since I don’t want to provide any potential spoilers — let me just say that I found the storytelling engrossing. I finished the audiobook in about two days — and completed a lot of yard work! 🙂

Highly recommended.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

I just got back from an eight-day vacation and I’m frantically trying to catch up, so instead of writing an actual blog post I’m just going to echo what I said on Twitter:

Tweet #1:
This is not a good day to talk about great books, but if I don’t mention it now I’ll forget. So…

Tweet #2:
I just finished the audiobook of I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. It’s about microbes: their ubiquity, their variety, their chemistry, and their interactions with the web of life that is Earth, including all of us.

(Hat tip to Vonda N. McIntyre for bringing this title to my attention.)

Tweet #3:
Highly recommended, and lots of ideas for you near-future SF writers. The world we live in is fascinating! Respect it, cherish it, preserve it.

Tweet #4:
Also, if you haven’t already, read KSR’s Aurora which has much to do with microbes and their contributions to ecosystems.
/end

After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid (audiobook)

OMG, I loved this audiobook!

After On was published last August and I have to confess that I didn’t hear anything about it when it came out and I was not familiar with its author Rob Reid. I decided to check it out because it kept appearing in the “also bought” recommendation list at Amazon, and because it was near-future and sounded like it was going to engage in themes similar to my own work — you know, near-future manipulative AI, that sort of thing.

I listened to the sample and I was still sort of “Hmmm…” But if I didn’t like it, I could always return it, so what-Ev-er!

And yes, so to-tally worth it. (I’m trying to capture the voice of one of the characters here.)

This is a smart, funny, ingenious, and informative novel. As the title suggests, it’s set in Silicon Valley and follows several entrepreneurial (OMG, I spelled that word right on the first try!) characters as they try to stay afloat in their highly competitive world while striving to come up with the NEXT BIG THING.

There is lot of informative discussion in this novel. EULAs and privacy and Pascal’s Wager, venture capital, how to make a fortune while your company fails, the implications of “Super AI”, Twitter lynch mobs, fiction as thought experiments that might be applied to life, Fermi’s paradox, people-people, and people who aren’t so good with people, just for a few examples.

It’s possible some of this might be a little tedious to read, I don’t know. I found it all fascinating to listen to.

The audiobook is read by a large and very talented cast. They put a lot of effort into their performance, and I found the story fun and fascinating.

Highly recommended.

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley

There seems to have been a good deal of publicity around this novel when it came out last October, but I missed all of it and didn’t take notice of Ka until I heard Jonathan Strahan praising it. The novel is published by Saga Press, which charges a very reasonable $7.99 for the ebook, so I picked it up, read it immediately, and I’m now perplexed that Ka did not appear on either the Hugo or Nebula ballots. This is a wonderful novel.

Ka is a story told from the point of view of a crow, whose name is “Dar Oakley” and who, by strange circumstance, comes to live over a span of time encompassing two to three thousand years. The stories he takes part in and the people he comes to know are endlessly fascinating.

Not since childhood have I been interested in stories told from an animal’s point of view, but this one was so highly praised I had to look into it, and I was hooked from the first page.

From a personal perspective — that of a writer forever struggling to comprehend the marketplace — Ka astonishes me for the sheer bravery required of its author to even conceptualize a novel like this — a novel about a crow! — and the confidence to believe, during the long hard writing process, that there would be a market for it. I hope there’s a market for it! I hope it’s doing well. And I’m very glad there are still great writers willing to take chances of this kind.

For more about the novel, see Gary K. Wolfe’s review at Locus.

Find it at Amazon here.

I usually provide a universal link to other vendors, but the link site wasn’t working. Sorry!

I’ve read several really interesting articles lately. Here they are, if you’d like to check them out:

“The Hunt for Wonder Drugs at the North Pole” by Kea Krause in The Atlantic
Remember how bioprospecting in the Arctic was a background element in my novel Going Dark? This article is about the challenges and potential of real world Arctic bioprospecting.

“Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?” by Adam Frank, also in The Atlantic
Oh sure, this sounds like supermarket tabloid material but in fact this is an utterly fascinating planetary-science article. The author tries to answer the question of what evidence might remain from some hypothetical long-ago civilization.

“Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day” by Jim Robbins in The New York Times
Did you know that a stream of viruses is “circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel?” I didn’t. Another fascinating article, and a testament to the awe-inspiring complexity of life on Earth

Finally, this has been a terrible week for the island of Kauai which has suffered record-setting levels of rain. (Don’t worry about me — I live on Maui and we’ve been fine.) It turns out there is a buffalo ranch on Kauai, and several animals were swept away by a flooding river, which led to the surreal scene of paniolo (Hawaii cowboys) rounding up buffalo on the beach at Hanalei. Take a look at the user-contributed video (second video on the page) here at Hawaii News Now.

Aloha and best wishes for a swift recovery to our neighbor island of Kauai!

New York 2140 is Kim Stanley Robinson’s newest novel and I love it. It’s a GREAT novel. It’s the best KSR book I’ve read in years and I’m supremely annoyed — No, more accurately, I’m embarrassed for our genre — that NY2140 is not on the Nebula ballot.

People! What are we here for if not to look ahead and imagine what might be, and to learn?

Alright. I understand. Science fiction means different things to different people and besides, SFF has long ago yielded dominance to the many great fantasy writers.

Still, this is a novel not to be missed. NY2140 is a wonderfully well written, engrossing, incredibly smart novel. It is also that rarest of birds in this genre of doom and dire warnings — it’s an essentially optimistic novel.

Very briefly, NY2140 is about an odd assortment of characters living and thriving in New York decades after two events of massive, successive sea-level rise. Lower Manhattan, aka “the Super Venice,” is flooded and has been for decades but life goes on — although buildings not anchored in bedrock continue to fall. Meanwhile, the world of finance — and the associated endlessly greedy billionaires — are still in control.

Early on in the story it’s hard to know what all these disparate characters have in common. Every passage is interesting, but from time to time the detailed descriptions can feel overwhelming. Just take a break and then get back to it (you’ll be drawn back to it). It’s all worthwhile.

In my early days as a writer, KSR was right up there at the top of my list of favorite writers. The Memory of Whiteness and The Wild Shore were favorites. But as his novels got longer and longer, I stopped reading them. Just in the last couple of years, I’ve started again, first listening to The Years of Rice and Salt and then reading Aurora. I suspect I am going to have to go back and read some of the in-between books that I missed. Given that I’m a slow reader, I might be some time at it.

Still, let there be no doubt: KSR is one of our greats.

Here’s a link to Amazon.

Here’s a universal link that will get you to alternate vendors.

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

I was looking at cover art — and searching out cover artists — when the cover of Sea of Rust, by artist Dominic Harman caught my eye at Tor.com. I hadn’t heard of the novel before that, I hadn’t read any reviews, but when I read the excerpt I knew I wanted to read more. Unfortunately, the ebook was priced at $14.99 which is far outside the range I am willing to pay so I moved on to something else. Then not too long ago I found the ebook on sale and happily picked it up.

Sea of Rust is a robot novel, meaning it’s about sentient robots with agency. So much agency that robots deliberately hunted down the human species and drove us to extinction thirty years prior to the start of the novel. Since then, robots have pretty much fucked over the world even worse than their human progenitors did before them. The “Sea of Rust” is a vast area of industrial ruins in Ohio and neighboring areas. When robots reach the end of their functional lives they are cast out of settlements and wander off to spend their last days in the Sea. Enter Brittle, our first-person protagonist, who gets by through hunting these nearly gone “404s” and harvesting whatever parts they have that might still be used.

The author does a terrific job with characterizations although I feel I have to add a caveat — the robots are essentially human personalities in mechanical bodies. This worked for me because it made the story very relatable.

Per usual, I’m not going to go any further into the plot. Suffice to say that Sea of Rust starts out as a sort of robot-cyberpunk-dystopian story, indulges in some impressive action sequences as the stakes rise, and ultimately grapples with philosophical issues about life and the meaning of existence. I really enjoyed it and recommend it highly.

Here’s a link to Amazon. (affiliate link)

Here’s a universal link that will get you to alternate vendors.

Gunpowder Moon
by David Pedreira

It’s been almost thirty-one years since my first published story, and Gunpowder Moon is the first novel I’ve blurbed. 🙂

It’s customary in publishing to send out pre-release copies of upcoming novels to other writers who might be willing to take a look at the work and offer supporting testimony if the novel works for them. I send out copies of my own work of course, and I’m very grateful to those who have taken the time to read my work and compose a blurb on it.

The more successful and well known you are as a writer, the more of these requests you can expect to receive. I don’t receive many and oddly, most are not in my genres. Also, I always have a long list of novels and stories that I’m already trying to read or that I’ve been asked to read, so — like most writers do — I promise to try, but with the caveat that I might not get to the book in time. All right, I admit. I’m not well organized and I’m a notoriously slow reader.

Happily, Gunpowder Moon was exactly the sort of novel I was looking for — near-future, hard science fiction, with excellent writing in the opening chapter that hooked me right away — and it arrived at just the right time so that I was able to read it.

Gunpowder Moon takes place after the “Thermal Max,” the peak point of global warming which has delivered a body blow to civilization from which the Earth is struggling to recover. Helium-3 has become the most important source of energy. It’s being mined on the Moon and used to power fusion reactors on Earth, but competition for lunar resources is heating up. When a miner is murdered, the fallout looks likely to lead to war, unless former Marine Caden Dechert, now commanding a lunar mining station, can find a way to avert hostilities.

Here’s my quote:
“In Gunpowder Moon, David Pedreira has crafted an excellent near-future thriller. This one’s got it all — realistic technology, an all-too-believable political conflict, and characters to care about — in a fast-paced story set amid the moon’s austere beauty.”

David Pedreira’s Gunpowder Moon is out today. The ebook is a reasonable $9.99. Check it out!

Here’s a link to Amazon.

Here’s a universal link that will get you a selection of vendors.

I listened to two audiobooks over the busy days of December and early January. Both were political memoirs.

For much of my reading life I’ve found it difficult to focus on memoirs or biographies. I would start eagerly but rarely did I manage to read them all the way through, perhaps because I’d get distracted by the latest novel. This problem doesn’t exist when I listen to audiobooks. Having someone read to me a fascinating narrative while I’m doing dull tasks like kitchen work or gardening is such a privilege, and I have no problem at all paying attention through to the end.

The first of the memoirs I listened to was Hillary Clinton’s What Happened. Written and also narrated by Hillary, it’s an excellent review of both the high points and the travesties of the 2016 election, from the perspective of an extremely intelligent, competent candidate with an amazing resume and record of doing good in the world. It’s also the voice of a woman who is ready to call out misogyny in the electoral process. If you’re a fan of Hillary Clinton you might want to read this book, although there’s a risk you’ll be plunged into despair all over again when you consider what exists in the White House now. If you’re not a fan of Hillary than I highly recommend that you read or listen to this book. Perhaps you will begin to change your mind.

The second memoir is Joe Biden’s Promise Me, Dad, and it’s also narrated by its author.

In 2013, Beau Biden — Iraq War veteran, attorney general of Delaware, and son of Vice President Joe Biden – was diagnosed with brain cancer. He died of his cancer less than two years later. Promise Me, Dad tells the story of those years, from the point of view of a very active and effective United States Vice President, who — at his son’s request — helped to keep Beau’s illness a secret until very late in the course of his disease. It’s a touching story of the Biden family, and also of Joe’s view of his role in government and the tasks that he worked hard to accomplish even as his beloved son was fighting for his life. It was the grief of Beau’s loss that kept Joe Biden from running for president in 2016.

Since the election – and since we’ve had to endure the venality and incompetence on full display in this administration and in the GOP Congress that continuously supports it – I’ve often found myself reflecting on Beau Biden, and thinking, “If Beau hadn’t died, there’s a good chance that Joe Biden might be the president right now, and how much better off we’d be if that were so.”

In any case, both Hillary and Joe would have made fine presidents. Both had the experience, competence, and work ethic that the job requires, as well as a devotion to national service. Yes, let’s remember that politicians are supposed to be serving their country.

As the saying goes, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” Maybe we do deserve this, but I desperately hope we can manage to throw the bums out before they succeed in burning the country down. Let’s strive to keep this democracy tottering on long enough to install actual competent, knowledgeable people in both Congress and the White House.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

You’ve probably seen this book around. It’s classified as a self-help book. I read an excerpt from it sometime ago and liked what the author had to say, but I felt like I’d already applied a lot of his principles in my life, so I didn’t pick it up.

Recently though, the subject of the book came up again so I decided to listen to the audiobook — and I really enjoyed it! It’s profane but humorous, it tells engaging stories to illustrate its points, and the narrator is excellent.

“Not Giving a F*ck” in this context is about seizing the power to choose what you “give a fuck” about. In other words, making the choice only to care about the things that really matter in life and “Not Giving a F*ck” about the rest of it, or about what others think of your choices. Of course there’s a lot more to it, including an interesting discussion of entitlement and a chapter on the effect of social media on our psyches. If you’re looking for a relatively short, smart, and humorous listen, check it out.