Solitaire Book Club: The Six Directions of Space

The Six Directions of Space by Alastair Reynolds. This is a short book -- reading its 85 pages this morning was akin to watching  a 90-minute movie -- so this will be a short review.

I am a sucker for alternate histories, and this story has the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan not only taking over the entire world, but also maintaining control for a thousand years and discovering interstellar travel thanks to the relics of a long-gone and unimaginably alien race. All this provides a great canvas for a tale of brutal politics,  complex spywork, parallel worlds, space battles, and ponies. It sometimes feels like a short story aching to be a novel, but it has enough rewards in its own right to be worth the read.

It won't take you long, anyway.

Solitaire Book Club: Station Eternity

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. I was drawn to this book by its core premise: if you really had life of Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple - i.e., if murders happened around you all the time, everywhere you went -  you would probably be a psychological wreck, suspected by the police, and feared/loathed by others. There's already so much to work with there, but Lafferty takes this character and drops them in a post-first-contact world with a plot that includes a shadowy government agency, a deranged sentient space station, eight or ten symbiotic alien races, a serial killer, sabotage, and a battle between a spaceship and mecha, and creates supporting characters that include an incompetent ambassador, a fugitive military mortuary specialist, a concert violinist with commando-level combat skills, a rap star, and a psychotic black ops contractor. Whew! That's a lot!

However, Lafferty takes all this and spins a ripping yarn across 452 pages and somehow manages to keep all (or most, anyway) of the plates spinning. I kept on reading, which these days says a lot in itself. Worth the time, if you have the stamina.

And it looks like this is just the first in a series. Buckle up!

Solitaire Book Club: The Thursday Murder Club

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The first few pages of this book made me think it was going to be a witty, frothy meringue of the "cozy" murder mystery genre; that impression was bolstered when I realized I knew the author from his work on various British quiz shows (which are more about the wit and humor than the quiz). Well, the book is clever, for sure, but it is much more than that. Osman presents an intricately detailed, complex, and multi-layered set of interlocking mysteries, the resolution of which plays out like a clockwork mechanism., and the ending to which is both surprising and inevitable, as Aristotle would have it.

But even more impressive is that the novel is not peopled by the stock characters so common even in well-crafted cozies, but by fully-realized human beings with all the depth and contradiction and doubt and fear and courage that we all carry. But it is still very clever.

A wonderful, rich work that transcends its origins.

Solitaire Book Club: Exhalation

Exhalation by Ted Chiang. This collection of short stories is simply one of the most rewarding books I have ever read.The prose is straightforward and unpretentious -- dare I say not very "literary"-- but every page is captivating. What Chiang does best, though, is bring the reader to a deeper consideration of ideas -- fate, free will, entropy, sentience, sapience, choice, consequence, truth -- trying to make sense of what it means to be a human being in a complex universe. Chiang may be the spiritual heir to Kurt Vonnegut in both style and depth.

I simply cannot recommend this book too highly - go read it.

Solitaire Book Club: Ministry for the Future

Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.  This is a formidable tome, comprising 106 chapter over 563 pages, with shifting points of view and narrative approaches, but it is finely craft and tightly fitted, like dovetailed carpentry, and the reader is never lost in its complexity. The novel - and at is core, it is a compelling novel, albeit with many other layers - presents a model for how we - humanity - could actually survive the coming climate change disaster, which will be literally apocalyptic unless we do something. Robinson outlines the technological, political, and economic changes that would be necessary for us to mitigate and even reverse the degradation of the environment, and they are all completely plausible - with one big if. 

In the novel, forces are brought to bear to curb the currently unfettered greed of the oligarchs, robber barons, captains of industry - the 1%. Some incentive is given by carrot, but an awful lot by stick. So countering the hopefulness created by the discovery of a potential escape route is the overwhelming sense when the book is closed that the billionaire class will never let any of it come to be, preferring their fantasy of being able to bunker down and ride out the end of the world while only the little people suffer.

Here's hoping that I am wrong.