Review: Hole in the Sky

Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had high hopes for this book, since I own the author's Robopocalypse and Robogenesis. However, while it had a fairly solid setup, the ending fell flat for me.

This may be because the book is primarily a thriller, and written in a very cinematic way, as if it's a not very subtle pitch to be a blockbuster movie. There are four main characters: 1) the Man Downstairs, who observes and babysits a quantum computer deep underground who has tapped into the forward-background flow of time in the universe and makes predictions that always come true. Lately, the Pattern, as it's called, has been spouting gibberish that gradually becomes not-gibberish, evolving into the readable thoughts of....something. Something the Pattern has tapped into that terrifies the Man Downstairs; 2) Gavin Clark, an agent for the Department of Defense who investigates what used to be called Unidentified Flying Objects, and who is dispatched by the Man Downstairs with a Pattern-derived warning of "first contact imminent"; 3) Mikayla Johnson, a project manager with the Voyager team at Nasa Johnson Space Center who stumbles across anomalous data in the Voyager readouts, data that points to one thng: a large object headed our way; and 4) Jim Hardgray, a Cherokee man trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter Tawny, who gets caught up in the whirlwind of planet-altering events when the unidentified object detected by Mikayla Johnson reaches Earth and touches down at the Spiro Mound, an ancient buried Native city in Oklahoma.

All well and good, so far. This is a story of first contact, and all the worldwide upheaval that would entail. The descriptions of how it is discovered, and how the nations of the world prepare for it (the United States, per usual, immediately starts gearing up for war) is what makes this book more of a thriller than a SF story, at least at first. However, it's when the object reaches Earth and lands literally atop the Spiro Mounds is when the disappointment begins setting in, at least for me. Because it's at that point that the story takes a turn into mysticism and extradimenionsional Lovecraftian entities, and that simply didn't set well with me.

Look, I understand why the story took the turn it did. The author is an enrolled member of the Cherokee nation, and the swerve the story takes is drawn directly from the history, myths and legends of the Cherokee people. I don't want to sound like I'm putting any of that down. But as the characters descend into the hidden underground city of the Spiro Mounds, we discover that all the tunnels and chambers here, once mapped and revealed, show an ancient extradimensional reality-bending...god-brain asleep under the Earth's surface? A god-brain linked to a ship apparently made out of nanotechnology, that the Voyager probes reaching beyond our solar system woke up and compelled to return home? And said god-brain can be manipulated by the thoughts and desires of Jim Hardgray, in much the same way his ancestors evidently sang it to sleep fifteen thousand years ago, to the point where he can not only use the god-brain's power to recreate the bomb meant to destroy it, but also to resurrect his deceased son, dead for two years?

I mean, especially that last, that's not going to come back to bite humanity in the ass. No sirree.

Well, due to Jim Hardgray's knowledge of the ancient Cherokee language and stories, the god-brain is defeated...kinda? At least until Jim's son realizes what he really is, which I guess could be the storyline for a sequel if the author ever wished to write it. And the chapters of all those extradimensional reality-twisting alien horrors coming to life are well-written and dripping with atmosphere. But as far as I am concerned, the climax of the book does not live up to all that came before, which is a shame. (For a really excellent Native-authored fantasy combining horror with searing commentary on this country's Native American genocide, try Stephen Graham Jones' The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. You won't regret it.)

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Review: Outlaw Planet

Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is set in the author's Pandominion universe. It is not the third book in the series, and is pretty much a self-contained stand-alone. I own the two Pandominion books but have not yet read them. However, I enjoyed this so much those books have been bumped up my TBR pile, and I daresay I will go hunting down the author's other books as well.

This is the story of multiversal travel to the titular "outlaw planet," where time works very differently--i.e., much faster--than the rest of the Pandominion. We have a weird Western, genetic engineering, an eternal war that is fought over and over again, artificial intelligence, mind control, and at the heart a thousand-year-old war crime that is slowly unraveled with fair clues and deft pacing, leading to a climax where the protagonists struggle and sacrifice to do what is right and save the planet's indigenous population.

Our protagonist is Dog-Bitch Bess, a genetically engineered, uplifted Labrador, made sentient and bipedal like all the planet's other inhabitants. She is introduced via a five-page prologue that is like a Western tall tale, and it's only when you get to the end of the book that you can reread it with fresh eyes. The entire first few chapters of the book are like that, laying out the worldbuilding and the background of Bess's life in a deliberate, old-fashioned manner. The fact that we are told right away that our main characters are not human beings is a clever way of drawing the reader in, and the rest of the worldbuilding is revealed in the same steady peeling of layers. Bess, or Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, leaves home and takes a job teaching in a small town of Ottomankie, in the southern district called the Echelon. She spends nine years there, falling in love with her fellow teacher Martha Good, while in the background the rumblings of civil war between the Echelon and the northern Parity territory are slowly brought to the forefront. When the civil war breaks out, Martha is killed, and Elizabeth in her grief turns outlaw and vows revenge, becoming the notorious irregular Dog-Bitch Bess.

There are many more layers than this to the story, of course, and each one is fascinating. There is so-called "Precursor" tech, from a high-technology past scattered across the continent, in the form of incredibly tall white dream-towers that do....what? We find out, and the answer is chilling. There are sentient drones and high-powered weapons, the latter of which provides our second protagonist, the gun Wakeful Slim that becomes Bess's companion and friend. There are the Pugfaces, wandering tribes that are just a little bit different than the rest of the uplifted animals, and when their origins are revealed they tie back in with that same thousand-year-old mystery. There is Bess's obsession with revenge for the loss of her lover, a revenge that is slowly turned as she understands just what has been done to her and the rest of the people on her world. Instead of looking inward to her personal hatred, she begins to look outward, and vows to bring the dream-towers down. And this is the story of how Bess, Wakeful Slim, and the Pugface engineer Dima Saraband do just that.

This is not a fast-paced narrative, and given the depths of the worldbuilding and mystery, it shouldn't be. Don't get impatient as you read it. As the clues are laid and the secrets are revealed, the story becomes incredibly satisfying. It all comes to a head in a poignant two-page epilogue which might bring a tear to your eye (it did mine). Those emotions are fully earned. I didn't expect to get this kind of story, but damn if it wasn't one of the best books I've read so far this year.



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Review: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow coined the word "enshittification" in 2022, and it is defined thusly by Wikipedia:

"Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders."

This book expands on that, explaining exactly how this works and giving four detailed examples: Facebook, Amazon, Apple's iPhone, and Twitter. It is no coincidence that the people running these entities are four of the worst people on the planet: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Elon Musk. If there ever was a proof that "absolute power corrupts absolutely," it's these four.

Most of this book will simply set your hair on fire, as Doctorow lays out how corporations screw over everyone else. There are far too many horrifying details to list, but I think this quote from p. 100 pretty much sums it up.

The CEOs who do this got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." It works with surprising consistency, and tech executives are so confident in the lessons of the Darth Vader MBA that they come over all affronted and hurt when their customers balk.

The news is not quite all dire, of course--this is pointed out in Part Four, The Cure. This goes into various antitrust actions around the world, with particular emphasis on Europe (which is light-years beyond the US, both law- and regulation-wise). Still, this book is a depressing read, as it shows clearly that after four years of vigorous antitrust actions and enforcement by the Biden administration, this country has backslid terribly (which is no more to be expected, with an ignorant entitled asshole trust fund reality show manbaby taking back the office). I don't know if we'll ever be able to claw ourselves out of this mess, but this book shows the way to do it, if you can get past your initial rage over what is happening.


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Review: Absolute Superman, Vol. 1: Last Dust of Krypton

Absolute Superman, Vol. 1: Last Dust of Krypton by Jason Aaron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third of DC's All In reboot/reimagining universe that I've so far read, and while Absolute Wonder Woman is by far the best, this one does come in second. (The best-selling title of the series is apparently Absolute Batman, which puzzles me, as I didn't like that at all.) The gimmick of the series is taking familiar characters and completely upending their origins, and by doing so drilling down to the essence of what makes them Superman and Wonder Woman. With Diana in The Last Amazon, even though she was raised on an island in Hell with the sorceress Circe instead of Themyscira with her mother and the other Amazons, the qualities of kindness and compassion that makes her Wonder Woman come through even more strongly. (That, and The Last Amazon is simply a fantastic banger of a story that you should read right now.)

With Absolute Superman, I think it's a little more of a work in progress. The bones of Superman's origin are all there--Krypton still blows up and Kal-El comes to Earth to be with Jonathan and Martha Kent--but the timing of these events is different. To begin with, Kal-El stayed on Krypton until he was twelve years old; he saw the rottenness of Kryptonian society, the extreme social stratification and castes, and how the ruling class exploited everyone and everything until they mined Krypton so deep it tore itself apart. He saw how the Science League treated his parents, refusing to recognize their accomplishments and sentencing them to death when his father Jor-El discovered what was going on. He was himself censured for writing his own school essays instead of relying on the Luminarium's AI (which is a scary little detail in this day and age of enshittified artificial intelligence). He witnessed Krypton's death throes from his parents' hastily constructed ship as it launched, until a final explosion from the dying planet tore the ship apart and cast everyone into space. A fragment from the ship enclosed Kal-El, keeping him alive, but he never saw his parents again.

He eventually reaches Earth, after a year and a half of travel alone in deep space, which sets him up for some major PTSD down the line. But Earth is different as well--it's ruled over by the global Lazarus Corporation, which exploits people pretty much as Krypton's ruling class used to do (and as we find out, uses extraterrestrial technology, with Superman's classic villain Brainiac behind the scenes running it). Kal-El does crash-land on the Kents' farm, but he's there for only about a month before Lazarus shows up and he has to flee. He spends the next five years hiding in the shadows, bouncing from place to place, fighting the Lazarus Corporation and helping people as best he can.

So as the story starts, Superman is a traumatized eighteen-year-old kid, coming into his powers but not at all in control of them, and having flashbacks to Krypton. The nobleness and goodness of the classic Superman character is still there, but it's deeply buried. He is quite capable of making major mistakes, and his rage from his lingering trauma pretty much guarantees he'll do just that. It's a fascinating take on the character.

Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson also show up, in completely different guises--Lois is a Lazarus agent tasked with hunting Superman down, and Jimmy Olson is a guerrilla fighter working for the Omega Men, the revolutionary group fighting the Lazarus Corporation. We haven't delved as deeply into their characters as yet, but Lois in particular is also a nice new take that should be interesting to follow.

For me, this isn't the best of the new universe, but it's certainly worth reading.

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