Network Effect by Martha Wells

 

I’m so glad Liberty Hardy talk about the Murderbot Diaries on one of the Book Riot’s podcasts or else I might have missed this series that has become one of my very favorite things to read.

My favorite rogue SecUnit is back, the sentient AI with organic parts and its dry, sardonic humor. Murderbot is living and working with his chosen human family when another ship attacks and kidnaps him and Amena, one of the humans he is protecting. Once aboard Murderbot realizes he knows the ship. It’s ART’s ship and ART need’s Murderbot’s help.

The plot is great but what I love about this series are the characters. For a non-human, Murderbot has a lot of human feelings, mostly annoyance and anger with humans and their stupid decisions and messy feelings. Despite its best efforts Murderbot seems to be forming relationships attachments with humans and other AI. (Murderbot would of course have a sarcastic thought at the idea that it was in a relationship.)

I love this series so much an when I truly love something it is that much harder to explain why. So instead, here are some of favorite passages from Network Effect.

Quotes

Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me. [page 20-21]

Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical like. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard client years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit. [page 29]

If a bunch of desperate colonists came up in the drop box, the ship could just do a quick detach from the dock’s airlock and it would be unreachable. It wasn’t a foolproof method but it was 90 percent effective. (Foolproof is another weird word. Shouldn’t it be smartproof? It’s not like you’re going to breach and seize control of a ship attached to a space dock by tripping or forgetting to bring your weapon or something.) [page 228]

Overse added, “Just remember you’re not alone here. I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are. [page 242]

Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey

    Without the natural resources of Earth or the military might of Mars, the people who live on the asteroids belt have always been treated like second class citizens. It is not particularly surprising then that when the ring opens up thousands of new worlds and one of them appears to be earth like - that is with air, water and other things humans need - a group of Belters decide to make it their new home. The Belter group names the new planet Ilus and sets up a settlement. Unfortunately for them, like colonial powers of the past the global powers that be don't especially care whether someone else got their first. They see land they want and assume they have to right to take it. The earth based UN government decides to assert its "rights" by issuing a contract to Royal Charter Energy (RCE) that gives the corporation the "rights" to New Terra (otherwise known as Ilus) and all its resources. The fact that people are already living on Ilus/New Terra matters not at all to RCE or the UN. But it matters to Ilus’ new settlers and to show it matters, the settlers set off an explosion as an RCE ship tries to land on the new planet, thereby beginning the first war in the new frontier. The UN's Chrisjen Avasarala and the OPA's Fred Johnson send James Holden and the crew of Rocinante to keep the peace until the global powers can come up with a more permanent solution.

Cibola Burn started off a bit slow. The first half of the book is basically argument and fight after argument and fight between various the settlers and RCE, with Holden in the middle trying and failing to make peace or at least stop the killing going on. 

As Holden fails to bring any measure of peace the planet starts mobilizing its own defenses against its human intruders. This is where things began to get interesting. There are death slugs, water organisms that make people go blind, and something that makes space ships stop working and fall out of the sky. But even natural disasters (to the extent anything on alien planet is natural, I suppose it has its own version of what's natural) aren't enough to stop people from bickering and so the fights and arguments continue on the ground and in space where each faction has a ship floating on stand by (along with the Rocinante). The series started with a mystery in space – what happened to Julie Mao and what the protomolecule was. Now everyone knows about the protomolecule and story is how people are reacting to it.

New point-of-view characters are introduced in Cibola Burn. There is someone from each of the relevant factions. Basia is a settler whose son was one of the kids who were kidnapped in the previous books. Holden and crew were able to rescue some of the children but they didn’t make it in time to save Basia’s son. Havelock who first made an appearance in Leviathan Wakes as Miller’s partner shows up here as one of the less sociopathic members of RCE’s security team. Elvi is one of the RCE scientists. Her sections were funny but mostly I enjoyed Holden and the investigator/ Miller. I really hope there is more of the investigator/Miller in books to come (despite Holden’s attempt to prevent that).

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes is book one in The Expanse series written by James S.A. Corey, which is the pen name of the writing duo consisting of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. (Query: Why do authors use pen names when everyone already knows their real names? This is a legitimate question. I really want to understand the reasoning behind this choice) The story is a mash up the science fiction and mystery genres set against the back drop of space. I loved it! 

Humans have colonized Mars and an asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Sufficient enough amount of time has passed that generations have been born and grown up on the asteroids and on Mars. Martians and belters think of themselves as separate and distinct from Earth. Not in the sense of being a different species, but in the sense of being citizens of different nations. This is especially true of the belters who because of growing up in the lower gravity of asteroids tend to be taller and thinner and have larger heads than humans from the inner planets of Earth and Mars. 

In one sense Leviathan is a story about global politics and scarce resources. Instead of Earth bound nation-states the superpowers are planet Earth and planet Mars. Earth has the things humans need to live - namely air, water, and soil where things can grow. Mars has the superior military force but its people live in domes because Mars's atmosphere is not yet suitable for human life outside of a dome. Belters are the poor colonials caught in the middle and at mercy of the inner planets. They depend entirely on Earth for oxygen, water, food – basically everything humans need to live. With a press of a button or maybe it is the turn of a knob, Earth can ration the amount of oxygen Belters breathe.

The story is told primarily from the points of view of two men: Jim Holden and Detective Miller. Miller has been assigned a missing persons case. He is tasked with finding a missing woman named Julie Mao. Julie left her wealthy family on Earth to live and work among the Belters. Her parents want her back home on Earth. Meanwhile Holden, a former soldier, works on a commercial vessel hauling water around in space. That he works on a water hauler is apt in part because the law of space is not unlike the law of the sea – if there is a distress signal and your ship is the closest then you are duty bound to come to the aid of the distressed ship if you are able. So when the Scopuli sends out a distress call, Holden and his shipmates go to help only to witness a disaster. In alternating chapters Miller searches for a missing girl while Holden and his crew try to figure out what secret is worth killing over and who was willing to do the killing. Eventually Miller's and Holden's stories intersect in an interesting way.

Effortlessly Diverse as It Is Entertaining  

In December 2015 The Expanse, a science fiction series, began airing on the SyFy channel. I originally bought this book with the intention of reading it before the show started but that never happened. One of things I noticed immediately on the show was its racially and ethnically diverse cast.  I wondered if that was due to a conscientious casting director. It is not, or at least that is not the only reason for the diverse cast. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck imagined a future that includes not only White people but also Asian people and Black people and all kinds of other people. Even better, the characters of color read like fully realized people. Personally in my experience, and I realize other people's experiences may differ, science fiction seems to assume a world where diversity means a mixture of blonds and brunettes or if there is a person of color in the story, there is only the one. It was incredibly refreshing to find something different in Leviathan Wakes. Yes and thank you people writing as James S. A. Corey.

Trying New Things: Hard Science Fiction 

I have a confession. I like the idea of science but am not particularly good at it. While I don’t purposely avoid it, it is not something I seek out either. When I read a book that for one reason or another has a lot of science (or complex math) my brain might initially try to decipher the science but eventually my eyes glaze over and my brain treats the science as magic and therefore as something that will never truly makes sense to me. What can I say other than I studied social sciences and humanities in college and graduate school, not the physical sciences. Admittedly part of this laziness on my part. Part of is not having the necessary background knowledge and taking time to acquire the background knowledge would take me completely out of the story. So I accept the science as magic and quickly move on. 

Leviathan Wakes is what people refer to as hard science, meaning a lot of the science in the book is real. I knew that going to it but read it anyway. Surprisingly I didn't mind the science. I was constantly looking stuff up to get a better understanding of things like gravity and its effect on the human body and what the deal is with asteroids. Overall the science was manageable. It was even interesting. Before reading Leviathan Wakes I thought of space the way I think of Antarctica – an exotic locale that looks pretty in pictures but that I will probably never visit and will spend little time thinking about. This book made me actually interested in space and the planets in a way that I have never been particularly interested. Not that I will ever go to space but I’m interested in learning more about it.

Yes It Is Really that Good 

My copy of Leviathan Wakes is an oversized paperback, really the size of a hardback only with a soft cover, and is 561 pages long. Between the length of the book and the hard science, I expected to spend at least two weeks reading it.  Instead I tore through it in about a week and the only reason it took that long was because there were two or three days when I wasn’t able to get any (or almost no) reading done at all due to other obligations. Getting through a 500+ page book in a week is a sign of good book in my opinion. Luckily it is part of a series. So I have more books to read. Also, The Expanse the television series based on the books is fantastic too. I am eagerly looking forward to season three.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

  Winner of the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novella, Binti is the story of a woman who leaves her family and her homeland to attend the prestigious Oomza University. She is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a position at the university. With an insatiable curiosity and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and learning, she can't say no to the offer although that is what her family would have her do. Himba people don't ordinarily leave their homeland. Binti boards the ship bound for the university anyway. Along the way the ship is attacked and Binti finds herself in the middle of a conflict between the Meduse and the university.

In Binti author Nnedi Okorafor may be telling many stories and one of them is clearly about race and outsiderness. At the transportation hub where Binti goes to catch her shuttle (spaceship?) women come up to her and start grabbing her hair without asking. They comment about and insult her appearance and customs in front of her as if she were an inanimate object. This is just one example of the indignities Binti endures as she travels to the university. She is made to feel unwelcome and different at every turn. Once upon the ship with her fellow classmates things improve. She is intelligent and curious and fits in well. Then disaster strikes.

I liked this a lot. This is third short piece of writing I've read in the past two weeks. As with Folding Beijing and We the Animals, I liked this but ultimately was left unfulfilled and wanting more. Maybe short fiction just isn't my thing. Then again, maybe wanting more is a good sign. I am honestly not sure.