Books

I love Ann Leckie’s writing. The Ancillary Justice trilogy is some of my favourite space opera, with tons of depth, and I also love what she is doing in Radiant Star. A city of pilgrims, living in a rock untethered from its solar system in the coldness of space. A whole society built around the belief that this rock will eventually find its star. Pilgrims visiting this “planet” for so-called visions from the monks. And then there is the politics and the petty battles between the different religious factions. ...

Sunward is William Alexander’s first adult novel, set in a far future solar system where private messages get carried between planets by couriers. Tova Lir is one of them, and she takes on the job of mentoring juvenile AI, essentially becoming a foster parent to adolescent androids. It’s a light read, I enjoyed the premise and the playful tone of the book. There are some interesting thoughts on what consciousness is, and what a world with conscious robots could be like. ...

Endling is set in Ukraine in 2022 and follows three main characters, Yeva, Nastia and Sol, on different arcs that intersect as the invasion closes in. Yeva is a biologist who lives out of her mobile lab, trying to breed rare snails back from extinction. I enjoyed it. The story and the characters are well put together, and the book captures the absurdity of the war and the many eccentricities of Eastern European culture succinctly. ...

I can’t say I enjoyed this one, and I’ve been trying to work out why, because the premise is genuinely interesting. A crew is sent out to make contact with something that has turned up at the edge of the solar system, and the book builds towards an argument that consciousness might be a liability rather than an advantage. You could have something enormously intelligent with nobody at all at home inside it. That is a strong idea, and it’s the reason the book has the reputation it has. ...

I picked this up at my local bookstore completely by chance. I didn’t know Doctorow had a new book out, and I like his non-fiction generally, so I bought it on the spot. It turned out to be a signed copy, which was a nice bonus. The title is worth explaining. A centaur, in the usual telling, is a person made more capable by a machine. A reverse centaur is the arrangement flipped around. The machine does the work, and the person is bolted onto it to handle the parts it can’t, at the machine’s pace and on the machine’s terms. ...