Redshirts has a concept that no Sci-Fi geek could ever pass up an opportunity to read. In the future, newly assigned starship crew realize that for no apparent reason the captain always takes a junior crew member on away teams, and that crew member dies every time.

And indeed this book starts off well exploring this idea from the point of view of the newly arrived ensigns, with plenty of tropes and references to delight the geek reader.

“In other words, crew deaths are a feature, not a bug,” Cassaway said, dryly.

Unfortunately it then doesn’t seem to know where to go, turning to another trope as the crew go back in time to our present day to find the actors playing them in a TV series; and finally ends weirdly with a third of the pages of the book left to go and a series of codas that don’t really seem to fit the original narrative.

★★★☆☆

After someone’s done with that social network, if they could implement something which lets me backtrack from content back to link I originally clicked to get it, that’d be great. I have no idea how this book got into my queue, I have a feeling it may have even been one of those cards you pick up in Starbucks. Anyway I digress.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is set in renaissance Venice and follows the story of the eponymous thief and confidence trickster as he attempts to con one of the city’s great noble families out of half of their fortune.

Ok, as befits the book’s hero, that was a slight lie.

The book isn’t set in renaissance Venice. It’s set in what renaissance Venice would have been, if it had been constructed on a planet with three moons, a thousand years before, by a long dead and departed alien race.

If the typical renaissance parts of the city were interspersed with giant structures of an alien material capable of holding and radiating light later in the day. If the citizens of renaissance Venice battled giant sharks for the entertainment of their peers.

Oh, and if there was magic.

So it’s like our world, but also very unlike our world. What we end up with is something akin to a Song of Ice and Fire, where the characters are very recognizable but the world perhaps isn’t.

And what wonderful characters they are! A failing of too many books is making the hero all-omnipotent; it’s one of the things I credit Harry Potter for, he actually needs his friends to win and likewise it is here too. Locke might be a great liar and conman, but he needs his fellow Gentlemen Bastards for the whole game; and all of them were trained together by the same priest who had plans.

The book takes an interesting narrative, interspersing segments in the presents with flashbacks to their training, or often to the recent past leading up to what just happened. It’s an interesting technique and often allows the author to side-step you and allow things to play out in a different way than you perhaps first thought. While some might find it jarring, the narrative is always consitent and never irrelevant so I found it a cute touch.

I found the characters and the story engaging and entertaining, frequently unable to put the book down; in particular an entire afternoon on the beach in San Diego engrossed in it, and more than one late night. In fact I enjoyed it so much I’m now reading the second in the series.

★★★★★

You’d think that somebody would make a decent effort to make a social network around sharing recommendations of content like books and music, because some of the most interesting books that end up in my queue to read come from such recommendations via other means (IM mostly).

Ready Player One was such a book, a friend recommended it out of the blue, and the description looked interesting enough that I added it to my collection for later reading and completed it a couple of weeks ago.

The book has a charming idea; in the future the world is going to shit and everyone spends most of their time in a giant cross between Second Life and World of Warcraft. The creator of this dies and leaves a great treasure hunt involving 80s classic computer games and geek references, the reward being the keys to the system and his vast fortune. On this chase the story follows a single character as he attempts to solve the clues, and the friends he makes along the way.

In many ways it reminded me of a Neal Stephenson novel, especially Reamde; and I mean that in a complimentary way. It kept a reasonable pace throughout the narrative and sustained interest through all the different happenings. Though nothing truly surprising happens, it’s not about that, but about being along for the ride and chuckling at just how many references you can get.

★★★★☆

Enough people have recommended that I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt that it’s surprising that it’s taken me as long as it has to finally get around to it.

This was my first of his books, I hadn’t read the Mars Trilogy, so as with any new author I wasn’t sure what to expect from it; especially since I’d been warned that in style it was fairly different from his other work, and that it also had slow parts that would take a bit of getting through.

All the reviews and recommendations were glowing though, praising the re-invention of a world without the influence of Christian Europe and the epic scope of the story across the ages.

Unfortunately mine isn’t. I can’t recall a novel that I’ve struggled through as much as this one. I kept at it hoping for a grand denouement that would explain the praise lavished on it, but that never happened. As ridiculous as it sounds, the book’s grand ending was a chapter explaining the style the book was written in, and the grand reveal was a cute schtick it had used throughout and that anyone with half a brain would have figured out within the first hundred pages.

Yes, the world building was clever and thorough; but I read a lot, especially Science-Fiction and Fantasy, and good world building is de rigour in the best works of those genres. A novel needs some other story or message beyond the world itself.

And if Kim Stanley Robinson had a point or message with this book, it was entirely lost on me. A novel set in a world without Western culture would provide ample opportunity to take a critical look at that culture, and say something about ourselves, but instead it ignores it and focuses itself on Islamic and Chinese culture and finds many faults therein.

A novel in which reincarnation plays such a significant part would provide ample opportunity to consider mortality, or the eternal struggle to better ourselves, but the book doesn’t go there either and instead if anything suggests futility as the central characters manage to be responsible for every significant scientific breakthrough throughout history without ever changing in themselves.

Maybe the central message was just supposed to be that all people and cultures are ultimately the same, that we all make the same mistakes and share the same victories, but even then it tries hard to avoid saying any such thing.

Honestly, as far as I could tell, the only significant point the author wanted to make was that San Francisco should have been built on the North side of the Golden Gate and not the South. He makes that point a lot!

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆