David's Diamonds

The set-up on Jason Hough's post-apocalypse science fiction novel is simply stunning. Aliens have without explanation built a space elevator in Darwin Australia and unleashed a plague that has killed most of humanity, with the remainder divided into brutal zombies and the few surviving humans clustered around the elevator, which provides a local immunity from the deadly disease. The book dives immediately into relentless action, as we follow Skyler Luiken and his crew of scavengers, who are about the only humans who are immune from the plague, while they battle zombies in the outback, fight with the thuggish warlord who controls Darwin, and ascend surreptitiously to the orbital stations attached to the elevator. I got completely sucked into the story, and couldn't stop reading. The characters are wonderful--Skyler is a resourceful and tenacious hero, and the main bad guy is wonderfully arrogant and fun to root against. The book excels at depicting very different locales: Darwin as a post-apocalyptic city, the high-tech remoteness of the orbital stations, and the Mad Max world of the outback. And Hough's take on the aliens seems to me remarkably, dreadfully prescient: they have an inscrutable, off-stage presence, coming in suddenly and inexplicably to rewrite all the rules, casually wiping out humanity in the process. 

Best of all, Jason is a long-time customer of Mysterious Galaxy who has now made the leap to becoming an author. You like to see a friend do well--and Jason has done exceptionally, extraordinarily well. The Darwin Elevator is a remarkable debut. It is the best science fiction novel I have read since first encountering John Scalzi's Old Man's War--it is that good. Read it--and years later you can say you were there with Jason Hough from the start.

This book is a lot of fun. Think James Bond, with magic, and a comedy chaser. Gerald Dunwoody accidentally blows up a factory and suddenly finds himself up to his neck in the Department of Magic, Spy Division. Luckily, his best friend Reg--queen of yesteryear long since turned into a bird--has got his back. Things go from bad to worse, and Reg can't help giving him a hard time. Read on to find how Gerald saves the day, laughing all the way.

First in a series, so the good news is there's more to read when you are done! Highly recommended!

Science Fiction

Michael Cobley’s Seeds of Earth is good old-fashioned space opera at its best. Galaxy-spanning war, check. Rebel human outpost facing down everybody, including evil alien Hegemony and Earth fellow-travelers, check. Holy smoke weapon McGuffins with a direct link to your sense of wonder, check. Insidious AIs and hive-mind enemies, check. Sympathetic alien species with mystical spiritual powers, check. Vast historical back-story, with alien adversaries of the legendary past suddenly reappearing in the present, check. Cobley covers all the bases. And he does so with flair. He tells the story from the bottom up, through the perspectives of five very different but sympathetic characters, whose bravery, resourcefulness, and intelligence are completely engaging. And wait--there’s more: Seeds of Earth is first in a trilogy, with new installments arriving in October and November. So, if you like your space opera shaken but not stirred, Seeds of Earth is your book. Highly recommended!

– David

In Count to a Trillion, John Wright takes up the great themes of classic science fiction. His hero, Menelaus Montrose, is a member of the first human-crewed starship, whose goal is to investigate the Monument, an alien artifact orbiting a nearby star. The Monument is a cypher, inscribed with glyphs of unknown significance. To read them, Montrose dares to boost his intelligence artificially, and so discovers the secrets of the galactic overlords, and of their plans for insignificant humanity. Like the best science fiction, Count to a Trillion is a novel of ideas. Wright is concerned about affirming human freedom against the dead necessity dictated by science, technology, and the daunting power of super-intelligent aliens with a galaxy at their command. To this mix, Wright adds the appeal of his own inimitable sensibility: a fascination with intelligence, mathematics, European history, classical virtues, Catholicism, and all things Texan! Above all, Count to a Trillion is a rip-roaring good read, told with immense exuberance and optimism. I loved reading this book--so will you! Tor, $25.99 --DJ

Give the gift of Dreams! Follow Randolph Carter into the farthest reaches of dreamland, accompanied by Lovecraft's menagerie of ghouls, zugs, and moon cats, to a conclusion both surprising and sublime. 'The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,' included in Dreams of Terror and Death, Del Rey.

Give the gift of Beauty! Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is like a long luxurious dream, filled with striking imagery and suffused with passion, that simply heaps you with beauty. You awake from reading this forlorn. Doubleday.

 

Review--

The Night Circus is like no other book I have read. You may read it as a novel, with strong characters and enthralling story well and deftly handled, but these usual literary suspects are besides the point of explaining why this book is so strange and appealing. Really, the book is about a place, the night circus itself, with its impossible collection of acts, illusions, and wonders. The place in turn is a world of art, done up principally in silver and black, with other colors appearing as accents, to create for the reader a remarkable visual experience. And the art in turn expresses the interior life of dreams and passions. Everywhere there is beauty, more and more beauty. You read The Night Circus, finally, for the experience, for the intense experience of lapidary beauty and luminous imagination. What a wonderful, truly magical, book! --DJ

There's a lot to like in Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde. As a spy-action thriller, the book is fun and it is fast – it’s a terrific ride from beginning to end. Vintage Stephenson is very much in evidence too: the virtual reality worlds of Snow Crash and the meticulous descriptions in Wired magazine of the economic and engineering underpinnings of our digital world appear again to great effect. Much is new: I found Stephenson's description of the new China arising within the global economy completely fascinating.

Most fascinating for me, however, was something much more personal. Amidst all the action and fighting, as the Forthrast family and their friends attempt to protect themselves across several continents from the depredations of Russian gangsters and Islamic terrorists, Stephenson seems to be exploring what counts for him as essential moral or human values. He turns to virtues like courage, knowing how to deal with whatever stuff that comes down, the willingness to act violently when necessary, restraint, chivalry. In an earlier age these might have been called manly qualities, but they apply to women as well: after all, the women in this book are more manly than the men, as they kick ass and shoot and fight better than the guys around them, no question about it. In Reamde, Stephenson reminds us how to live. This above all makes the book great and worth reading. -- dj

So I asked friend and customer Douglas to pick out the one book he would have me read in the store, and he handed me Peter Watts' Blindsight. Having read it, I can say that this book will come as close as a book can possibly come to really and actually blowing your mind. It's a first contact story on philosophical steroids. Watts is fascinated by all the questions relating to identity: what makes us a person? what is consciousness? how does that differ from awareness? what is intelligence? Watts brilliantly uses the first contact situation of humans and aliens trying to figure each other out as a way to raise all these issues at once. So, you get a crew peopled by a) the main character who, having had half his brain removed to prevent gran mal epilepsy, thinks of himself as a living example of John Searle's Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence; b) someone with multiple personalities, charmingly referred to as the Gang of Four, c) etc. etc. etc. Basically, Watts populates his novel with all the different varieties of consciousness he can think of, and watches them go off when they go up against the alien Other.

Very thought provoking, serious science fiction, fiction in the mode of Einstein's thought experiments. Douglas and I are still talking about it. Great stuff. Highly, highly recommended.

A stunning, unforgettable book. Shepard leaves you out on the imagination's furthest edge, amidst horrors and dreams, beauty, sadness, and the hints of apocalypse. With a prose style so lush as to be Victorian, Shepard is America's latter-day Joseph Conrad.

A completely original take on the future of artificial intelligence, chock full of dazzling action femmes and cool hyper-tech toys, with literary style and terrific political satire to boot! It didn't win the Hugo, but it should have. A great novel, and a wonderful read.

Wow! This series is good! Weeks gets everything right: great appealing characters, surprising plot twists, evil villains so wicked young children should not read these books, and even moral reflection. But basically--a terrific read. I couldn't put it down.