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ellarienThese are two very different books, with little in common except that I read them close together. I dropped Spin State when Destroyer came in, then picked it up again for the weekend trip, finished it, started The Wizard Hunters, dropped that when I got home to finish Destroyer, and then finished it a couple of days later. Both books probably suffered a bit from the juxtaposition with something I'd been anticipating for over a year, and possibly from juxtaposition with each other. I used to be fairly careful about mixing and balancing my reading to avoid clashing flavours, back when I had a large backlog to go at; I don't have that luxury any more.
I picked this up at the Stanford bookstore as emergency backup reading for the trip. It's not quite the kind of thing I normally choose -- in fact, I tend to bounce off cyberpunky things in the bookstore -- but I did more or less get the reading protocols to engage on this one. It's a first novel, grim and grungy and full of ideas. I'm not entirely convinced by the central conceit of room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates, mined in a twentieth-century-style coal mine on a marginal colony world. Then again, I probably wouldn't have believed liquid-nitrogen-temperature superconductors twenty years ago, and by the time I finished my PhD they'd taken over most of the rest of the Condensed Matter Group. The protagonist is a hard-bitten UN soldier, heavily cyborged, relying on electronic storage for most of her memories because of what travel by quantum entanglement does to human memory, and concealing the fact that she's also genetically engineered. I didn't really understand why the 'constructs' were discriminated against; that aspect of her wasn't the inhuman part. Maybe that's the point; that prejudice doesn't have to have a reason. There's murder, conspiracy, and corruption, against a background where Earth is ecologically wrecked and inhabited only by the fighters in Ireland and the Middle East. The love interest is an AI. The protagonist slips in and out of the 'spinstream' (cyberspace, more or less) as casually as she commutes from the space station to the planet, and with almost as few clues for the reader to keep track of which is which. Other characters frequently 'shunt' through third parties, which isn't as confusing as the rest of it.
It's just as well that the story comes to a fairly well-defined end; I'm not sure how inclined I'll be to pick up the sequel.
The Wizard Hunters,
This is fantasy, set partly in a world at (I think) early-twentieth-century tech level, with magic, and partly in a world with much lower tech and very different attitudes to magic. Mysterious invaders, the Gardier, who have anti-technology magic as well as anti-magic magic, are staging on the latter to attack the former, and winning. Tremaine, the protagonist, is from world A. She's smart, stubborn, and has a death wish; in fact, in the first chapter she's contemplating suicide, only to get distracted by an old friend who needs her -- and a magical artifact she's had since childhoold -- to help with a desperate experiment. for the war effort. Adventures ensue, with Tremaine and a couple of friends stranded on world B in a Gardier base, where they meet some of the natives, including the decidedly cute Ilias. Whirlwind romance does not ensue, fortunately; instead, there are more adventures, and the artifact turns out to be rather more complicated and powerful than it was supposed to be.
I missed Death of the Necromancer, so I'm not sure (though I can guess) which parts of the backstory refer to that, but this wasn't a huge problem; it looks as though the new series can stand on its own, though I wouldn't say that this book can. The book finishes with plenty of questions unanswered, and appears, from the included snippet in the paperback, to lead fairly directly into the sequel.
This was a fun read, with plenty of ideas, engaging characters, and a fast-moving plot. I suspect I'd have enjoyed it even more if I were ten or fifteen years younger, though.
Spin State, Chris Moriarty
I picked this up at the Stanford bookstore as emergency backup reading for the trip. It's not quite the kind of thing I normally choose -- in fact, I tend to bounce off cyberpunky things in the bookstore -- but I did more or less get the reading protocols to engage on this one. It's a first novel, grim and grungy and full of ideas. I'm not entirely convinced by the central conceit of room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates, mined in a twentieth-century-style coal mine on a marginal colony world. Then again, I probably wouldn't have believed liquid-nitrogen-temperature superconductors twenty years ago, and by the time I finished my PhD they'd taken over most of the rest of the Condensed Matter Group. The protagonist is a hard-bitten UN soldier, heavily cyborged, relying on electronic storage for most of her memories because of what travel by quantum entanglement does to human memory, and concealing the fact that she's also genetically engineered. I didn't really understand why the 'constructs' were discriminated against; that aspect of her wasn't the inhuman part. Maybe that's the point; that prejudice doesn't have to have a reason. There's murder, conspiracy, and corruption, against a background where Earth is ecologically wrecked and inhabited only by the fighters in Ireland and the Middle East. The love interest is an AI. The protagonist slips in and out of the 'spinstream' (cyberspace, more or less) as casually as she commutes from the space station to the planet, and with almost as few clues for the reader to keep track of which is which. Other characters frequently 'shunt' through third parties, which isn't as confusing as the rest of it.
It's just as well that the story comes to a fairly well-defined end; I'm not sure how inclined I'll be to pick up the sequel.
The Wizard Hunters, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marthawells
This is fantasy, set partly in a world at (I think) early-twentieth-century tech level, with magic, and partly in a world with much lower tech and very different attitudes to magic. Mysterious invaders, the Gardier, who have anti-technology magic as well as anti-magic magic, are staging on the latter to attack the former, and winning. Tremaine, the protagonist, is from world A. She's smart, stubborn, and has a death wish; in fact, in the first chapter she's contemplating suicide, only to get distracted by an old friend who needs her -- and a magical artifact she's had since childhoold -- to help with a desperate experiment. for the war effort. Adventures ensue, with Tremaine and a couple of friends stranded on world B in a Gardier base, where they meet some of the natives, including the decidedly cute Ilias. Whirlwind romance does not ensue, fortunately; instead, there are more adventures, and the artifact turns out to be rather more complicated and powerful than it was supposed to be.
I missed Death of the Necromancer, so I'm not sure (though I can guess) which parts of the backstory refer to that, but this wasn't a huge problem; it looks as though the new series can stand on its own, though I wouldn't say that this book can. The book finishes with plenty of questions unanswered, and appears, from the included snippet in the paperback, to lead fairly directly into the sequel.
This was a fun read, with plenty of ideas, engaging characters, and a fast-moving plot. I suspect I'd have enjoyed it even more if I were ten or fifteen years younger, though.