I absolutely loved this book. I started reading it and had no desire to put it down until it was done. As usual, I didn’t read the inside flap of the book so I couldn’t remember what it was about. Because of this, every twist was a surprise for me, and delightful surprises at that.
The narrative style was fantastic. Rich descriptions without using a lot of words, punctuated by a main character who is an island of one, the book felt like Evelyn, the main character, was telling me how she arrived at a particular point in her life.
This reminded me of another book, one with an unreliable narrator, who was telling the story as if to make the reader/listener feel compassion for some truly horrendous acts. I genuinely thought this book would end differently, that I would find out Evelyn did something extreme and awful and the story was her justification of her actions. But it wasn’t, not really.
Evelyn is an award winning scientist. Her research is in cloning people. She can grow a complete replica of another person in about two months. Conditioning the clone is part of the deal, where she helps the clone to ‘remember’ events so the clone can behave as the person expects.
These clones are supposed to be used for organs or to take a bullet, definitely not for long term use. They aren’t considered people, so ethics are as firm as they can be.
Evelyn discovers her ex-husband, Nathan, has created a clone of her, named Martine. She had no idea Nathan had done this, had only thought he was interested in hearing about her research. The author skillfully created Evelyn to be a product of an abusive household, one where the mother tends to the father’s every whim and the father expects Evelyn to conform to what he wants in a child. Evelyn learned to be invisible, to not take up space, to not ask certain questions. This conditioning carries through in Evelyn’s life outside her mother and father, demonstrated by her blindness to Nathan’s cruelty and subterfuge. But also from her lab assistant, Seyed, someone she trusted and felt completely herself around. It’s eventually revealed that Seyed has been stealing supplies for another company and also assisted Nathan in creating Martine.
Some readers might be frustrated by Evelyn’s blindness to the people around her, but for me, this character felt wonderfully well written. Martine as well, she was Evelyn but also not Evelyn. Martine was a blank slate, trained to behave in a specific manner.
Martine breaks through her training to become her own person. She also gets pregnant, something clones shouldn’t be able to do. When Martine questions Nathan about this, about whether or not she was conditioned to want a child, Nathan reacts by trying to kill her. Martine kills him instead, then calls Evelyn in a panic.
They deal with Nathan’s body and soon need another Nathan because if his murder were to get out, Evelyn would lose everything she’s worked for, so they clone him. This is where I thought the book was going to go down a dark, dark path, but it didn’t. The ending, while satisfactory, also could have been written to demonstrate much more disastrous consequences to Evelyn’s actions.
Still, I loved this book. Normally I dislike any title with wife, mother, or daughter in it as it usually indicates that the main female character is only a person in relation to the husband, child, or parent, but in this case, the title was remarkably spot on. I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes navel gazing and a deep view into what it’s like to be the product of long term abuse.
I read a previous book by this author and was delighted to find out this one was xenofiction.
An alien race finds out that a human, Andrew Martin, has solved the Riemann Hypothesis and that just would not do. They sent someone out to ensure this information didn’t spread through humanity, and that someone is the narrator of the story.
The alien takes the form of Andrew and attempts to adjust to being human while trying to delete all evidence of the solved hypothesis. This alien was to murder anyone with whom Andrew shared the knowledge.
At first disgusted by humans, AlienAndrew grows to enjoy the company of the son, Gulliver, and the wife, Isobel and chooses to keep them alive rather than kill them. This, obviously, causes problems.
The author manages to highlight a lot of the dichotomies of being human and does so in a manner that never let me forget that the main character is an alien. There’s a lightness in the narration of heavy concepts, which I found delightful.
The book is remarkably moving, well written, and a curious glance into what it means to be human. Definitely would recommend to anyone.
This book was recommended through Goodreads and involved aliens, so it was right up my alley. Besides, how could I say no to a cover like that? So bright and colourful 🙂
The book felt like it was going nowhere for longer than I’d prefer. The story was told in snippets and it was a bit difficult for me to keep up to what was going on. It all made sense eventually, but I could see why some may not finish the book. I enjoyed it overall though, and would read it again, especially now that I know how it all fits together.
Let’s start with the characters. Two of the three main characters run a bar/inn called Skyward Inn. Jem is human. Isley is Qita. They’re both veterans of the war between their planets. Skyward Inn is inside the walls of the Western Protectorate, which is a walled-off area that doesn’t participate in technology or politics. The Protectorate is where Devon, England is now.
The third character is Fosse, Jem’s son. Jem gave him up practically at birth to join the military. Fosse lives with his uncle Dom, who is Jem’s brother. The parent/child relationship is nonexistent. I didn’t feel like Jem had any connection at all with this person she brought into the world. I had the impression she might have liked to get to know her son better, but made little or no effort to do so. This boggled me, but I can forgive it because the author had a different story to tell.
At Skyward, people enjoy drinking Jarrowbrew. This is a concoction of Qita and helps relive memories with exquisite clarity. The story opens with Jem drinking some to relate a story of her impressions of Isley’s homeworld. As the story progresses, I had the feeling that Jem wanted more than just friendship with Isley, but the mechanics weren’t possible. Qita species isn’t really described much, except to say they’re blue-skinned and humanoid.
The war was somewhat peaceful. Qita surrendered easily and without fight. Humans thought they won, but they didn’t, not really. Qita welcomes new arrivals because they absorb them and become one big mass of organic matter. But this isn’t revealed until near the end of the book.
The hint is that three new arrivals to the Protectorate do a magic trick where they can merge hands. They lay their hands upon each other and become one. Separation is possible in the beginning stages. Humans think this is a disease. They quarantine the affected area, but there’s no stopping it. Qita don’t fight it at all. This is part of their evolution process. They merge with other species and themselves, then are separated from the whole to live again.
Memories are shared by all during this merging. Time is also a non-issue during the process. Jem begins to merge with Isley so she can experience her son Fosse’s future memories as he hikes with a Qita guide to learn about their planet. Ultimately, Jem chooses not to join the merging. There’s no expectation that anyone must join, it’s always presented as a choice. Fosse, however, struck by being the last human around after the hike with a guide, does choose to join the merging. From what I understood, all of Earth was merged as well because Qita and Earth are connected by a Kissing Gate in space. So the surrender of Qita was actually the first stage of what humans would call an invasion. By the end, humanity is mostly (or all) wiped out.
The novel left me with questions, but in a good way. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good twist (although I spoiled it here, but the title warned of that). The details were revealed in a way that felt linear and satisfying, but it was hard to get into.
I loved this book so much that when I was done I wanted to write the entire thing myself. I wanted to marinate in this universe, explore every option, and exhaust every possibility of every life the main character could have lived. There’s even a smattering of envy that the author wrote this instead of me. Why did I like it? Well, let me tell you a little about it first.
Nora Seed is not enjoying life. The book chronicles several disappointments in her life, culminating in the decision to take an overdose. Rather than outright dying, she ends up in a library filled with green books. The librarian resembles a librarian from her childhood, Mrs. Elm, and shows her The Book of Regrets. This book is heavy, as regrets tend to be, and filled with every regret Nora has had from birth to the overdose.
Mrs. Elm tells Nora that she can peek into another life, another Nora, one where the original Nora didn’t have a particular regret. Nora’s first decision is to eliminate the regret of leaving her partner Dan, and opening a pub with him instead. The librarian hands her a book, she starts reading, and pops into the Nora that lived in the timeline where these events occurred.
This concept fascinated me. I’ve spent a fair amount of daydream time considering how much I’d love to travel back in time and redo an event or unmake a decision, or even make a decision rather than sit idly by. The author’s take was that Current Nora would inhabit Other Nora’s body on the same day as it is for Current Nora. So, no going back in the past. Also, Current Nora didn’t have any of the knowledge that Other Nora had. She had no history in this timeline, so a lot was unfamiliar, including her own body, to some degree. But she did retain knowledge of her original life, so she viewed each new life through the lens of her old life.
The longer she stayed in one place, the more memories would come to her. If she felt any disappointment or desire to return to the library, off she went and met up with Mrs. Elm again. If she decided that this was the life she wanted, she would get to stay.
As long as she was in between life and death, she was in the Midnight Library and could access other timelines. As soon as something happened to her original self – like she died or woke up – the library would vanish and she’d go back to her original body or be dead.
Nora explored many options, everything from Olympic swimmer to famous keyboardist/songwriter in a band to a life working with dogs. The more lives she explored, the more she understood that she had no right to take the life away from Other Nora, and that what she thought was a good life was also fraught with negativity. The whole story reminded me of the phrase: if we all put our problems in a pile, we’d each take our own rather than someone else’s if given the choice. Nora got a nice glimpse into many lives, but ultimately knew the best one was her original one, if the overdose doesn’t kill her first.
The book hooked me immediately. I loved the author’s voice, how the choice of words seemed to bring a lot of information while saying relatively little. Each chapter is small, nicely bite-sized, so I never felt bogged down or like I was slogging through, as I sometimes do with long chapters.
I borrowed this book from the library, but I think I’ll go out and purchase it so I can read it again and again. Maybe even write fanfiction about it so I can live in the world a little longer.
I decided to step outside science fiction for a bit and read a gentle mystery. This isn’t a whodunnit kind of mystery, but instead one where the narrator reveals things slowly until the reader has a full picture of the events that took place. There’s probably a name/genre for this type of book. If so, feel free to let me know.
This is a story of the friendship between Jane and Marnie. They were inseparable for over two decades, until things went bad. Jane is the narrator, slowly explaining how things fell apart. She uses seven lies as touchstones. These are lies that she told Marnie, stating that she never ever lied outside of these seven. Not very realistic, but I understood because memory is faulty and sometimes little things get lost in the shuffle. It’s evident that Jane is jealous of Marnie’s husband, Charles though. I thought that jealousy was the ultimate reason for the falling out, but I was wrong.
The story meanders, winds around long curves and wanders through tangents. But at the same time, the author only gives enough information to satisfy. I never felt like I wanted to hurry things along or that the information was irrelevant. Instead I felt like Jane was telling me a story and didn’t want to get to the awful part just yet.
Jane is an unreliable narrator though. She tells the entire story from her point of view, enough so that I felt sympathetic toward her up until the last fifth of the book. Somewhere around there I started to realize that she’s a bit obsessed with Marnie. At first I thought the story was being told as if the reader is the listener, that Jane is explaining things to me. But no, it’s revealed quite late in the book that she’s talking to someone very specific.
The tension picks up very nicely in the last fifth of the book. So much so that I was glued to the pages and ignored other responsibilities just to find out what was going to happen. The end was satisfying. Excellent work by the author for keeping the characters believable throughout, including the epilogue.
This is an excellent story of friendship and how obsession has the potential to destroy even the strongest relationships. I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes descriptive prose, slow reveals, and a bit of horror near the end.
I received this book from the library terribly fast. I really thought I’d be waiting longer for it to be available. I read the first page to see if I should start this book or another, and ended up reading it at every available moment I had. I loved this book. Absolutely adored it. Let me tell you why as succinctly as I can.
The narrative voice was consistent and delightful. My eyes wanted to eat every word so my brain could have something to munch on. I wanted this book to go on forever, yet also wanted to get to the end of the story. Not because I was eager to finish, but because I desperately wanted to know how the author was going to wrap up the storyline.
The author’s choice of descriptors were vivid, delightful, and innovative. I don’t think there’s any repetition (or if there is, very little) in adjectives, which kept the book fresh from page one right to the end.
The pacing was excellent. Not once did I feel like the book dragged on or skipped anything important. The author had an excellent sense of how much information to give to keep the story moving, but also how little to give to keep my attention hooked.
I loved the main character – Anna – mostly because she felt realistic to me. She was someone I could imagine in real life, ‘warts and all’ as my mom would’ve said. Anna has her faults, she’s vulnerable, but she’s also got a core of toughness that impressed me.
Now I’ll tell you about the story.
Anna is a “hench”. This is someone who works with the villains when asked. Yes, like henchmen but without the gender specification. Anna works for a temp agency that hires out henches. Even Meat – the muscle of the operation, so to speak. She gets a job and is injured by a superhero named Supercollider. The temp agency promptly dismisses her, leaving her out of work and deeply wounded.
While healing, Anna starts checking into the cost of superheroes. How many lifeyears are lost to the supes’ carelessness? How much property damage? That kind of thing. This hooked me immediately. I’ve consumed enough superhero media to ask these questions myself. The supe always saves the day, but at what cost? Anna posts her Injury Report online and gathers a bit of following.
Anna needs a job, and applies everywhere. When on her way to an interview, she’s intercepted by a villain named Leviathan. He wants to hire her for her ability to amass data and parse it in whatever manner is most useful.
This is the story of a budding villain. Anna isn’t necessarily evil, but she does want superheroes to be held accountable for their careless destruction. Her tactics are somewhat evil though, in the sense that she knows how to manipulate people.
All of this is set in a world where people are tested for abilities, then, if they are found to be in great enough quantity, the person is groomed to be a superhero. This world is immersive. I was enveloped in it from the first few pages and only left when I closed the book. Excellent work by the author.
Some other notables: the book felt technically perfect. Every scene had a purpose. Every event had a conclusion. No extra words were used and none were spared. I felt like this is a fine example of constructing a story, one I’d like to remember as I write my own.
I was pleased to read how well the author worked genderfluidity into the narrative. This was done exactly as I’ve experienced it in real life: there are people who prefer they/them, there are trans people, there are people who are not straight. There was no shaming, no shoehorning. The author made this feel remarkably commonplace, and I absolutely loved it. Remarkably refreshing compared to many other books I’ve read.
This book could easily be converted to a ten episode series. More accurately, I want this to be a ten episode series, as long as it’s done well and with the author’s consent and participation.
I heavily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys superheroes, a tongue-in-cheek style of narration, and multifaceted, interesting characters caught in a plot that’s resolved neatly and efficiently.
Image from my favourite website for book covers: Goodreads.com
Once again I’ve managed to put a book on hold at the library that’s about an apocalypse. Yep. Another one. This one created by humans. I read the first page just to get a feel for it and to decide whether I wanted to read another book featuring a pandemic. I ended up reading the whole book.
This is a story about kindness, love, mothering, and connection with a backdrop of human destruction and elimination.
This book’s pandemic was in the form of a nanobot that could rewrite DNA. Things went wrong, because of course they did, and the solution was to create robotic mothers.
These mothers were to gestate and support a child. Originally, 50 of these Mothers were created, but only 22 survived. The children were connected to the Mothers by a chip implanted in their foreheads/brains. This chip allowed the Mothers to talk to their children.
The scientists in charge of creating these Mothers decided to fashion their personalities after actual women, the same women who would provide the eggs for insemination. This way, the personalities of the Mothers would match those of the child. I know from experience that a child can sometimes barely resemble a parent, but for the convenience of the book, I accepted the premise fairly easily.
The children search for each other. Well, the Mothers do the searching. They find each other in small groups, some remained alone until the Mothers are called to one location. The remaining/surviving scientists figured out how to call all the Mothers to one location to provide the children with shelter, food, and water. This was mostly successful. While there, the Mothers experienced a shutdown where the mental connection to the child was temporarily severed. Also, the Mothers’ programming indicated a threat, so they refused to allow the children to leave the area. One of the children, and the scientists, work together to reprogram the Mothers to re-establish a connection and dismiss the non-existent threat.
So that’s the basic storyline, and it was effective enough to keep me reading. I enjoyed the author’s narrative voice and didn’t find any inaccurate information to make me want to hurl the book at the wall. I felt like the story had been edited well, but I might have liked a bit more filling out.
When the children meet each other, there’s barely any page time about their interactions with each other. One child in particular turns out to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, not believing that there isn’t a threat. It might have been nice to have that interaction explored a bit further, or even at all, really.
The story jumps time around, but only by about a decade. The author does an excellent job in tying the times together, bringing one up to speed after learning about the other. This style helped me to understand the timeline of the creation of the Mothers, their implementation, the development of a child from 6-10 years old, all with the pandemic in the background killing people and rushing the production of the Mothers.
While the book features some difficult language in terms of biology, DNA, and whatnot, I didn’t feel too lost while reading. I didn’t much understand some of it, but my understanding was basic enough to not get frustrated with the rest of the story.
The cast is diverse, with a spotlight on the Hopi. I very much enjoyed the gentle touch of adding First Nations people and weaving the beliefs through the book. This was done subtly enough that I didn’t feel slammed over the head with it but masterfully enough that I felt the author gave honour to their traditions. Having said that, I’m not really qualified to decide that on behalf of the Hopi.
If you’re looking for a science fiction book that’s not too heavy in science, rooted in love, and a cautionary tale of human’s interference with itself, this may be the book for you.
This book is little, like only 116 pages of big text and wide margins. The words are unjustified (rag right) which looks somewhat amateurish. I don’t know why the author would’ve chosen this, except as a stylistic choice to make the book resemble a manuscript typed on an electric typewriter from the 80’s. Oh, and it’s written in Hemingway style, which forced me to focus on every word. I read the entire thing in one sitting. When I was done, I didn’t quite know what to think.
The characters didn’t seem to be engaging with each other, only existing as separate entities in the same space. The dialogue was jarring and unnatural, the setting barely filled in, and the apocalypse is only vaguely there.
The story felt empty, like there was so much to work with and the author decided to give the reader the barest of bones. There’s an idea of an apocalypse in that a plane (with two of the characters in it) lands suddenly, and a TV (with three other characters watching) goes dark. There’s talk of what happened – no internet, phone, lights, or data – but scantly. I felt like this book was the prologue to a much larger story.
After reading I hopped over to Goodreads to see what others had to say about it, as I felt like I missed something. Boy, did I ever miss stuff.
One review rivaled the book’s length in words. I skimmed through it and realized this person had a much better understanding of the work. Perhaps if I was a literary major, or had any education past high school, I’d’ve found the same references and deeper meanings to the sentences/phrases as the reviewer. As it was, I didn’t. Instead I realized that this book is aimed toward someone who could recognize all the nuances, indulge in them, and contemplate their importance to the world at large. So, not me.
Wow, it’s been a while since I read anything. I participated in NaNoWriMo and finished (yay me!), but my brain felt like it was melting so I took some time off from reading and writing and indulged in the plethora of movies I had queued up and ready to go.
Just as I started to feel like my brain was ready to absorb the written word again, the library informed me of some books on hold. I picked them up just before my city went into another lockdown phase, so, good timing all around. Normally I’d go through the categories I set up for myself and write up a blurb for each one. Not this time. Oh nay nay. I’m just too overwhelmed with life stuff to adhere to such strict guidelines. Instead, I’m simply going to babble like I know what I’m talking about. You know, trade in ‘perfect’ for ‘done’. More of a blurb review than an itty bitty one.
Side note: how the hell am I going to run an author’s website if I can’t even review books on a regular basis? That’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s jump in…
This book is labelled ‘science fiction’, which is probably the reason I wanted to read it. But there wasn’t much scifi to be found. If I squint really hard I can see the apocalyptic future as the reason for the genre, but that’s it.
The premise is that winter never left. There’s no indication of Those In Authority discussing the problem or attempting to find a solution. I would’ve thought the reader would be informed of why winter never left, what did humans do? Or was it an external force? We never find out, which turns out to be okay. The story isn’t about how it got cold, but how Wilodyne (Wil) manages in this new environment.
Wil lives in the Appalachian mountains and grows cannabis in a farmhouse. Her mom latched onto a grower who taught Wil everything, and it turns out Wil is exceptional at the task. She has no idea what caused the cold and seems out of the loop in regards to information. In the day and age of cellphones this had to be explained away. The author did so by saying there wasn’t much service on the farmland so Wil remained unaware of how bad things were getting. Her mom and stepdad leave for California before the book begins, Wil elected to stay behind and tend the cannabis crop.
The cold is like a second, but main, character of the book. It’s ever-present and a constant, gentle reminder throughout the novel. I could feel the cold leeching through the pages and settling into my bones as I read the words. My fingers ached as if I’d been outside shovelling or scraping my car. Excellent work by the author, keeping the theme of cold consistent and never allowing the reader to glance away from it.
The story is about how Wil decides, rather abruptly, to leave the farm and seek out her mom and stepdad in California. She hitches her tiny mobile home to the back of a truck and sets off. By this point she’s already got one tagalong, Grayson, who helps her out a bit. They pick up a couple more people and encounter a few camps, all while the reader learns that Wil might be gay and believes that men frequently pose a threat of some kind.
Overall I enjoyed the book, but it ends open and that bugged me a bit. Wil is headed for California and ends up in a greenhouse – one that’s functioning – somewhere not too far from where she started. It appears to be a nice oasis, finally: a warm and functioning greenhouse, but we don’t get to meet the people running it because the damn book ends. I suppose it can be inferred that Wil flourishes here, as she’s a grower, and will make a suitable home in the snow.
Well, that’s it. Not a bad book, not a great one either. The cold feeling will stay with me for a while, but that might be because of the snow outside my window.
I tried to read two books before Quarantine and had to put them both down. One because it was labelled as ‘hard science fiction’ but was actually ‘slavefic barely removed from the fan fiction universe with the tiniest hint of science fiction’. It featured a drug that made people acquiescent and I wanted to know more about the development of it and what made the drug necessary in the world. Instead the book revolved around the romance of two people, one who bought the other. Yeah, bought. Not a good concept in today’s social climate.
The other book was one I’d been looking forward to because I enjoyed the author’s first book. But it featured a pandemic. While the subject wasn’t a problem for me, I couldn’t get past how the characters continued shaking hands. I mean, the book was written before covid entered our lives, and the handshaking is a minor point, but it bugged me enough to close the book.
So when I was notified that the library had Quarantine ready for me, I jumped on it. I’d put it on hold after stumbling over recommendation after recommendation to read it, so I was wondering what all the fuss was about. Plus, it features quantum physics which is a topic I’ve been looking to read.
There are a lot of complex ideas in the book, complex enough for me to have a hard time grasping them. The author presented the information well, I just think my brain filled up too quickly and felt stuffed early on. Nevertheless, I persevered.
To Start: The starting concept of the book is a near-future detective hired to solve a locked room mystery. By the middle, the story evolves into dealing with collapsing the quantum wave into one single reality. The learning curve felt steep but manageable.
The book was written in 1992, so before the Internet. This is usually a big red flag for me because technology has changed so much since then and become integral to daily lives. Most fiction doesn’t represent the near future well as it’s remarkably hard to predict. This one though, this one did a good job on showing what life would be like with mods installed in the brain. Nowadays that mod would include a connection to the Internet, but in this book the mods are nanomachines and I believe information is kept on ROMs. Oh my.
While it’s only 220 pages, it packs a wallop.
The Gloss: The cover image is a representation of the double slit experiment. In this image, the slits are the words of the title and the white is the wave pattern of unobserved particles. Excellent representation of the book.
The font was slightly squared and easy to read. Nice for my eyes.
The Characters: One main character: Nick Stavrianos, a private investigator or detective. He’s well rounded and likable. He talks to his dead wife a lot, in the form of a hallucination/hologram created by a mod in his brain. This image of her is realistic to him, but also a bit of an embarrassment that he’d even have that mod. He’s a logical thinker and pretty much accepts whatever life throws at him.
The rest of the cast was diverse enough for me to be pleased, considering it was written almost thirty years ago. None of the other characters had much of an arc, but that’s okay. The book is written in first person so I only expected to be able to follow one character’s arc.
Nick falls apart, slowly and surely, as the book progresses. He is someone who’s in control of his life and the discovery he makes about a company named The Ensemble (who he ends up working for, pretty much against his will) causes his mind to collapse in on itself. It’s subtle, how he goes from confident to questioning.
The Plot: Nick is hired to find a woman, Laura, with severe mental disabilities. She’s escaped from a locked ward at a psychiatric facility. In his investigation he shows up on the radar of the people studying her, and they ‘recruit’ him to work for them. In this world he’s drugged and wakes up with a new mod: loyalty. Because of this mod he works for The Ensemble without question. He ends up unravelling a much bigger mystery of how The Ensemble was using Laura’s disability to learn to exist without collapsing the quantum wave.
The Story: As indicated above, Nick gradually loses his mind. He begins as a fairly normal guy who’s good at his job and doesn’t question the world around him too much. During his investigation he’s recruited to join The Ensemble and is guarding someone who’s using a mod to choose the direction of silver atoms. This person is testing the mod to eventually be able to exist without collapsing the quantum wave. Steep learning curve here.
Nick’s mods falter and he learns he can ‘borrow’ her mind to move through reality without collapsing the wave, thereby ensuring that out of the millions of possible outcomes for any scenario, he will always have the most desired one. This is tested by him performing increasingly difficult tasks – like breaking into a building across town – as his confidence wavers. He ends up questioning everything and unable to simply accept the world at face value.
I believe Nick is also part of the testing program, not just a bodyguard. His mods interact with the person he’s guarding, and The Ensemble put mods in his head, so it’s likely that he’s a volunteer participant in this study as well. Although he’s told he’s just a bodyguard and he believes that.
A background story item is The Bubble. Thirty years prior, this Bubble surrounded the solar system and blocked out the stars. No reason was given for this Bubble, but late in the book it’s revealed as a parallel to the wave function collapse storyline. Somehow, aliens knew humans were collapsing the wave and so our solar system was sectioned off from the rest of the galaxy.
The World: The worldbuilding was wonderfully integrated into the story. The reader is immediately alerted to the mods (which are helpfully bolded) and their basic function. Nick explains the mods to the reader in a way that’s natural. Kudos to the author on that one.
In addition, nanomachines are mentioned as something commonplace. These machines assist the mods in mapping the brain for compatibility, which makes sense, and also regulate the body’s needs, like suppressing hunger and whatnot. This is logical.
One aspect I enjoyed was how Nick thought of his mods. He understood he had a loyalty mod which made him loyal to The Ensemble, and he knew this thinking was out of line for a person without the mod. Just like the sentinel mod made him able to sit for hours and remain alert without getting bored. He knew his thinking was altered, and that knowledge made it easier for him to accept his behaviour.
Excellent bit of worldbuilding there, the idea that the mods work with the brain’s systems, not to change anything, but to enhance specific areas to produce the desired result. Need to be on a stakeout? This mod will allow you to remain alert without ever getting bored or hungry. Nick was a cop and “primed” by priming mods that made him less human but more capable of reacting unemotionally to any situation as it rose. Sudden bomb going off? Primed mods directed Nick’s behaviour to survive and assess the situation calmly.
Nitpicks: The conclusions Nick drew were accurate, but not probable. I’ve read many mysteries and although I know that books are contrived because they have to be, Nick’s conclusions felt too pat, too easy for them to be correct, and yet they were correct. Minor point, I know. The book was about collapsing the wave function and the mystery part was the secondary aspect, but it still bugged me.
Overall: Holy cats I enjoyed this book. It was hard and rewarding. I think I’d need to reread it to fully understand some of the quantum stuff presented, but I still understood enough of what was written to enjoy the story. Although perhaps not enough to be able to give a coherent review about some of the more difficult ideas.
The author’s writing style was easy for me to read and the info dumps were acceptable. Luckily, those dumps were short and compact, which helped.
The book held up well considering it’s thirty years old. I don’t have much faith in older books when viewed in today’s light, but this one passed easily.
I think I need to buy this book so I have a copy of my own. Maybe read it again when my brain feels less full.
Should Be Writing 