Someone’s Read it Already

I had never read anything by Philip K. Dick prior to this work, and it isn’t even actually a novel. In any case, Mr. Dick was a major force in the science fiction field prior to his death in 1982; several of his novels have been made into major motion pictures. These include Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and Total Recall, as well as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which most of us know as Blade Runner. Apparently a lot of his stuff is strange, and one reason for that was his experiences with drugs and his fascination with metaphysics and the paranormal. Above all, though, he was a storyteller; he won several awards for his writing, including the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. This screenplay was first published twenty years ago; Subterranean Press will be releasing a new edition in August of this year.

This screenplay was based on his 1969 novel of the same title. It concerns a man named Joe Chip, who is employed by a man named Glen Runciter. Runciter’s corporation uses people with peculiar psionic talents that mostly block the invasive talents as a security system for big companies. For example, the people from Runciter’s company can block telepaths from stealing company secrets. Joe works the machines to make sure that the employees of the company are actually accomplishing something. However, something awful happens, and there’s an explosion. Glen Runciter dies, and then Joe’s world starts falling apart — literally. The cigarettes are all stale; the cream is rancid and moldy; parts are falling off of things. Then the objects start regressing — cars turn into older versions; televisions turn into radios. What on earth is going on? And what is this Ubik product? (more…)

Astute readers might remember that sometime last week I complained that Cory Doctorow had not yet gotten around to releasing his latest work for free on the internet. Well, he promised it to us Monday, and by gum, we got it on Monday. Unfortunately I’d already cued up a review for Tuesday, so you get it Wednesday. Most won’t complain. Cory Doctorow is not the Ragtime guy; that’s E. L. Doctorow. Cory is the BoingBoing.net guy as well as the guy who wrote this other book that I reviewed a few months ago.

Before I get into the plot, I should say that this novel’s anti-draconian-copyright-laws essay is different, and contains some wonderful ideas.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, “Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free — because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash.” Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they’d discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. [...]

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they’re readers, they’re people who love books. [From the introduction to Little Brother, retrieved from Craphound.com on May 5, 2008.]

Now, I am hardly advocating book piracy, but I love this quote. However, I’ll get on with the review and stop discussing politics. Or can I?

Marcus, a.k.a. w1n5t0n or m1k3y, is a techno-savvy 17-year-old kid living San Francisco, in a world only a few years removed from our own. (Actually, by simple addition, it’s around 2010 or 2011. See the ‘Sega Dreamcast’ reference for my dating.) Computers monitor everything from your car to your schoolbooks via RFID (”arphid” — radio frequency identification) tags, and Marcus knows how to get around every single one of them. One day, while playing an ARG (sort of like a combination of a computer game and a scavenger hunt; there was an interesting episode of Numb3rs about these), Marcus and his best friends are caught outside when terrorists bomb San Francisco, blowing up the Bay Bridge. The four of them are arrested and thrown into a prison. Naturally the Department of Homeland Security is using ‘national security’ as the bugbear to scare everyone into complying with horrific laws, including ridiculous amounts of surveillance and arrests if you don’t fit their definition of ‘normal’. Also naturally, Marcus (once he is no longer imprisoned) decides to fight it. Yes, the DHS. (more…)

I suspect everyone who reads fantasy or science fiction knows who Marion Zimmer Bradley was, whether it’s because of The Mists of Avalon, the Darkover series, her Sword and Sorceress anthologies, or her magazine. Anyway, she’s passed away, leaving Elisabeth Waters and Diana Paxson to guide her empire, but she’s also left about a zillion books spanning at least 45 years for us to read. This one, an early SF title intended for YAs, is available through Project Gutenberg as well as Manybooks.com (the first link, to Manybooks, takes you directly to this novel). It doesn’t appear that the copyright was ever renewed, and therefore is has passed into public domain.

Bart Steele has just graduated from the Starfleet Academy, and his father, who owns an interplanetary shipping company, was supposed to meet him at the station. Instead another man, clearly not his father but pretending to be, meets Bart and tells him to play along, or his life will be in danger. The Lhari, the aliens who made first contact with humans, appear to be looking for his father. Those same Lhari are the only race in the known universe that has discovered the warp drive, and they control all interstellar travel and transport. Why are they looking for Rupert Steele? What has he gotten himself into? (more…)

This is the third book in the trilogy, which started with Uglies (appropriately enough) and Pretties. If you’ll recall, Westerfeld is married to Justine Larbalestier, last year’s Norton Award winner, and the two of them spend summer in New York and summer in Australia. This, of course, necessitates two sets of practically everything, and I’m almost in amazement that there are writers who can afford such stuff.

Tally Youngblood started the series as an Ugly, an under-sixteen in her future society who has not yet had the mandatory surgery that makes you cookie-cutter beautiful and perfect for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, I cannot describe the plots of any of the books without giving away important plot points of the other volumes, so I’ll just skip to the cut here. If you’re reading this on the Livejournal RSS feed, I’m sorry, and I hope you’ve read the books or that you don’t care. (more…)

(Available here.)

I’d never read anything by Cory Doctorow other than BoingBoing.net, and when I found that some of his stuff was available through DailyLit, I thought it was about time to remedy that. Of course, I immediately picked a book that wasn’t available via bite-sized emails, but considering that he’s got all his works on Project Gutenberg, that was okay. For those who don’t know, Doctorow is an award-winning novelist and an activist for internet and anti-DRM related things. If you read one of his books on Project Gutenberg, you’ll also be treated to a brief essay on why he does what he does. It’s actually quite interesting and includes such lines as, “The worst technology idea since the electrified nipple-clamp is ‘Digital Rights Management,’ a suite of voodoo products that are supposed to control what you do with information after you lawfully acquire it.” (Well, I thought it was funny.)

This book, apparently his third novel, is centered on Alan (or Andy, or Antoine), an individual with quite an interesting personal history. His father is a mountain and his mother, a washing machine. I’m not kidding. He has several brothers, including an island and three who nest like Russian dolls. In any case, he moves to the Toronto area when he is in his early thirties, and renovates a house. His neighbors are a little weirded out by him, especially Mimi, who has secrets of her own. Before long, Alan becomes involved with a project that a punk-anarchist named Kurt has started: free internet for everyone. He builds little repeater stations out of junk that he dumpster-dives for and sets them up in various locations, in order to expand free speech. What he finds in the dumpsters that he can’t use, he sells on eBay in order to buy the things he can’t scavenge. Alan finds this intriguing and gets involved as a more polished facade for Kurt’s business.

Unfortunately, all this while, one of Alan’s brothers, the one he thought was gone, has come back and is now stalking Alan and the other brothers. So he and the careful way of life he has carved out for himself, as well as his friends and neighbors, are all in danger. (more…)

This book is the sequel to Uglies, reviewed previously. It’s the middle book of Westerfeld’s initial Uglies trilogy. He’s still an American author married to an Australian author, and they split their time between the two countries a bit strangely: they spend summer in both places. I’m a Midwesterner and I actually like winter (when my gas bill isn’t approaching the $500 mark), so that would drive me crazy, but they seem to love it. They’re lucky that they have that option!

Pretties starts a few months after Uglies and its cliffhanger leaves off; in order not to give anything away about the plot of either book, I’ll be putting it behind a cut. Read on at your own risk, or, of course, go check Amazon for what the back of the book actually says. (more…)

Scott Westerfeld is an American, married to Justine Larbalestier, who is Australian, and they split their time between the two countries (and a few others). Uglies is certainly not his first book, but it appears to be the most popular (or part of the most popular series) at the moment.

Tally Youngblood is just a few short months away from her sixteenth birthday, and in her world, that means she gets to turn from an Ugly into a Pretty. It’s basically an Extreme Makeover, complete with bone reshaping, liposuction, and implants, so you conform to a ’scientifically determined’ standard of beauty. Everyone gets this makeover, which is good, of course, because that way people can’t get judged on how they look. Her best friend, Peris, has already undergone the transformation, and she misses him. On the way back from sneaking out to see him (in New Pretty Town), Tally meets another Ugly, due to get Prettified the same day she is, named Shay. They become friends, and then Shay tells Tally her big secret: there’s this guy named David, and a town called Smoke, where people escape because they don’t want to get the surgery. Tally, of course, desperately wants the surgery, so when Shay leaves she doesn’t follow. Until the government gets involved. (more…)

I have to admit – this was the first full-length novel by Ursula K. LeGuin that I’ve ever read, although I’ve read two volumes of her short stories. I’m not entirely sure I can do a proper review of it at this point, since it is one of those books that needs to sit on one’s consciousness for a while. Nevertheless, I shall try.

The story is told from several points of view, but most prominently that of Genly Ai, a Terran who has come to the planet of Gethen, or Winter, as a first-contact Envoy. It starts two years into his term there, and the story begins almost precisely when things start going oddly. Genly Ai’s job is to ask the Gethenians if they would like to be part of the Ekumen, which is a coalition of more than 80 worlds for mutual benefit, mostly involving trade. The Gethenians in Karhash, the first ones we meet, are a bit distrustful, but Genly isn’t that discouraged. (more…)