Review of “Where Have All the Mousies Gone” by Mary E. Lowd

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Lowd is an established writer based in Oregon, and says this was inspired by her grandmother’s death and the 2016 election. This story runs 1033 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

Narrator’s mouse grandmother has died, after a night of pain and nightmares of the cat invasion. The cats chase the mouse people like they are nothing but dolls to be played with, maybe eaten and maybe just killed and left to rot. Narrator lies to give their grandmother comfort, promising the cats are gone, but then they have to work to make sure it really happens. Afterward will be a chance to really say goodbye.

This is absurdist. It’s not immediately clear that we’re dealing with cats and mice here. There’s a nice introductory paragraph about thoughts on dying before the narration begins, and then the emotional heart of the story is grandmother’s death and Narrator’s lies that give her ease. Lowd says her grandmother was upset about the 2016 election, and this makes one wonder how the family might have tried to ease her pain about it. The virtual visit at the end is a common desire, the dream that keeps mediums in business. How wonderful would it be to bring back the ghosts of the dead for just one more brief conversation?

On the less positive side, there doesn’t seem to be any subtext in the story that explains why we have cats invading in flying saucers and mice living in human-type cities. Is this about politics some way? Liberal mice and conservative cats? The virtual reality tech used to contact the dead at the end of the story is developed from the cats’ particle blasters. The tech is unexplained, and again, there is no clear subtext to relate this to reality. Something about turning the enemy’s weapons against them? Unknown.

Three stars.

Review of A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

This is the second book in the series, following the Hugo Award-winning A Memory Called Empire. The novel was released March 2, 2021, by Tor Books and runs 496 pages. It’s billed as Space Opera that “reinvents” the genre, and was a Dragon Award finalist this year. Arkady Martine is the pen name of AnnaLinden Weller, a historian and city planner. This review contains spoilers.

The story picks up a short while after A Memory Called Empire leaves off. The old Emperor of the Teixcalaanli Empire has passed away, causing a political upheaval, and leaving a new Emperor in place and an 11 year-old clone heir. The Empire is beset by dangers, as mysterious aliens are lurking at the borders, slaughtering humans and destroying outposts. The Emperor has dispatched Admiral Nine Hibiscus with a fleet to deal with the problem. The encounters are not going well, so Nine Hibiscus tries a different tack, requesting an expert on first contact from the Information Ministry. Three Seagrass volunteers to take the mission and searches out Mahit Dzmare, Lsel Station’s Ambassador to the Empire, for help. Dzmare has returned to the Station, where she faces death threats from Councilors in the government because of her survival of their sabotage attempt on her imago memory line and her performance as Ambassador. Mahit takes Three Seagrass’ offer in order to escape and the two join the Fleet to help analyze sounds recorded by one of the ships. Armed with the results, they manage to establish a contact with the aliens. Is there any way to negotiate a peace treaty?

Like A Memory Called Empire, this story is a leisurely, slow-moving narrative, but it remains gripping because of all the threats. Themes include colonialism, genocide, and collective consciousness. The world-building is already pretty much done, and Martine doesn’t add a whole lot more, putting all the work into intrigues and developing new characters. The situation was fairly desperate at the end of the first installment, so we start off in a pretty dire place. Mahit is looking at an unfortunate “medical error” that would kill her in an investigation of her “defective” imago, which is a technology developed on Lsel Station to record and save memory so skills can be transferred. Three Seagrass is Dzmare’s former liaison from her stint as Ambassador to Palace Earth where the Emperor passed away, and Mahit is sent off with demands from her government that she sabotage the Fleet and its task. Lsel Station is way too close to the alien encroachment; Nine Hibiscus’ assignment looks like it’s planned to be a suicide mission, and Eight Anecdote, the young heir, is treading on dangerous ground. Various people step up to be heroes and everything ends fairly well, with Dzmare looking at opportunities outside Lsel Station.

On the less positive side, the leisurely pace got to feeling like padding about three-quarters of the way through as it really started to slow down the action. The investigation of experience, background, thought-processes and feelings is helpful to develop characters, but eventually it got out of hand, especially in the insecurities department. This would have been a much more entertaining read if it were about 25-50 pages shorter and cut some of that out. Next, I ended up uncertain who the main protagonist is in this installment of the story. Dzmare was clearly it in the first book, but the profusion of characters here and the shifting viewpoints confuses the issue, leaving this more of an ensemble performance–I’m actually tempted to say Eight Anecdote should be the main character. I was led astray by the introduction of kittens living in the ships’ air ducts; I was sure these were baby aliens, and maybe they will eventually turn out that way. Still, it’s a loose end. And last, the Emperor’s heir seems to have gotten away totally scot free on what is certainly major lesé-majesty, or maybe treason. Assigned by the Emperor to be her spy, he eventually makes decisions counter to hers, sabotages her communications with the Fleet and substitutes his own orders instead. This seems a little much for an 11 year-old, and it should set up a succession battle, imprisonment, execution, exile, but…nothing happens. This is another of those misleading, permissive fantasies where there are no consequences to behavior, no matter how transgressive, as long as it’s done for the “right” reasons.

Four stars.

Review of “Correction” by Hal Maclean

This is another flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it by email through a subscription service. Hal Maclean normally writes epic fantasy and he is the designer of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, among others. I also see a lot of work out there like articles, stories and books in support of games. The story runs 145 words. This review contains spoilers.

This work is a creative format, made up of a series of short corrections issued about an article on alien contact. The first one reads “An earlier version of this article stated, ‘Alien invasion fleet’ rather than, ‘Meng Liberation.’ We regret the error.” The corrections continue, outlining the progress of the liberation and its effects on humanity.

This is exceptionally short and sweet, as Maclean has condensed a whole novel into just 145 words. It’s a fairly humorous, but also serious, social commentary about how the viewpoint of articles can be changed by just a few words, and it also reveals the mechanism of totalitarian dictatorship and an enforced narrative that rewrites history after the fact. I gather that his point is, “words matter.”

Five stars.

Review of Unfair Advantage by Edward Thomas

This is a science fiction/humor novel published 29 January 2020 and runs 551 pages. It’s also billed as The Troubles of George McIntyre Book 1, suggesting this will be a series. There’s a teaser at the end of this novel for the next release, titled Angels, Inc. This review contains spoilers.

George is going camping with his buddies. He says ‘bye to his girlfriend Ginny and takes off. Meanwhile Detective Cook has found his fourth decomposing body, running with goo that corrodes the coroner’s table. The cause of this is an invisible alien probe in orbit around the Earth. It is struck by a piece of space junk, and the canister’s operating system fixes the holes, but the joggle has mixed some of its infectious vials. When the next batch strikes George and his buddies, the buddies become decomposing zombies, but George accidentally gets the “defense” vial. He collapses and wakes as a multitalented troll. Meanwhile NASA has suddenly noticed the orbiting probe, mainly because of the sudden disappearance of the space junk. The government alerts. Ginny isn’t really happy with the troll thing, and soon George finds he’s being tailed by Men in Black, but it’s not long before he’s planning what to do about the upcoming invasion. He projects that the aliens are AIs in a failing Dyson Sphere around their sun, looking for more resources. He sets up a company called Angels, Inc., and uses junk to manufacture robot warrior women as weapons. He picks up math/physics genius Jimmy, currently living with his mom and stocking shelves at the local supermarket. Now everything is set. Can they defeat the orbiting probe?

This is very readable with engaging characters. It’s an alien invasion, of course, but the author’s approach is entertaining and clearly in no way serious. It progresses from the opening to George’s solution to the upcoming invasion, an army of robust robot warrior women who quickly discover nookie. It turns into something of a PG romp, clearly meant to be engaging to a certain audience, but there are also a couple of serious themes buried in there. First is the power of uniting with other persons or nations to accomplish important goals, and second is the need for social support plus opportunity to unlock the unused potential many kids (and/or older persons) carry inside them. In addition, there are some excellent action sequences here when the AI warriors take on both the aliens and the government forces.

On the less positive side, I was really charmed with the opening, but not being the target audience, I was less interested in the ensuing fun and more interested in the early still mostly human George, the particulars of the invasion and the warrior AIs created to deal with it. I was especially intrigued with Brunhilde the Giant Tank. I can see a possibility for darker adventures starring Brunhilde, for example, that take a more introspective and angst-ridden bent. After all, it must be a little awkward to be what she is. Her little group of current friends is accepting of that, but most people won’t be. Also, I thought the defeat of the probe was just a little too easy. There could have been a lengthy cat and mouse game there.

Best enjoyed by teen aged young adults of the male persuasion.

Three and a half stars.

Review of Free Dive by C.F. Waller

This novel is a science fiction thriller published by Cosby Media Productions that runs 336 pages. It has apparently made the Amazon #1 Best Seller list in the past and was nominated for a couple of awards. This review contains spoilers.

Dexter Knight and his partners Cam and Lydia have developed AI operated robots to steal salvage from the ocean floor, and are currently working on retrieving teacups from the Titanic which they can sell for a nice price. Eventually one of their sales goes wrong, and a mob with guns moves in to kidnap them and hijack their operation. Uncertain of who they’re working for, the team deploys their robots in the Marianas Trench, where an unknown object starts to look like an alien artifact. Knight is attracted to the research team’s scientist Ronny, a little put off by the tough Russian ramrod Katya, and struggles to deal with the project’s gun-toting management. The artifact starts to look more dangerous as they continue to investigate. Is this a threat to human civilization?

On the positive side, this is a well-written adventure story with entertaining characters and a nice, rising action line that develops considerable suspense. There’s plenty of space in it for the character interactions and a few plot twists to keep the story interesting. It didn’t turn out like I was expecting at all. The maritime details are sketchy but generally believable. Waller also has an interesting take on AI bots, and I thought their behavior here was a little unsettling. Hmm. Following up on that could actually produce another interesting novel.

On the not so positive side, I had some suspension of disbelief issues with the activities of the aliens and the tolerance of the technology the research team used in the Trench. Yeah, in an emergency, I can see stretching things a little, but (as little as I know about ocean exploration) I think working at the Trench depth went a little beyond that and wouldn’t really be possible. Also, I thought some of the characterizations were a bit over-the-top, which detracted some from the story.

Entertaining but not er, deep. Three and a half stars.

Review of Transmission by Morgan Rice

This novella is young adult science fiction and is listed as Book 1 of the Invasion Chronicles. It is self-published and runs 187 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Kevin and his mom get the news that he’s been diagnosed with a rare brain disease and only has about six months to live. Symptoms of his disease include fainting spells and hallucinations including visions of alien landscapes and strings of numbers. All the adults tell Kevin he should ignore this and that treatment might help, but his friend Luna thinks the number strings might be important. A quick Google indicates these are the coordinates for the Trappist star system. Should Kevin notify SETI that he’s receiving alien transmissions? What if they don’t believe him?

This book is billed as young adult, but my estimation is that it’s more middle grade level. It’s seems a bit simplistic for young adult, which often includes fairly adult themes these days. This a quick, easy read and the story flows along well, including a slightly humorous take on the adult characters and the various government organizations that blunder through the alien contact. The theme seems to be cooperation. The tone is fairly low key, even when things start to go wrong, and Kevin’s mom is always there to stand between him and anything bad coming his way. Plus, Luna remains his faithful friend.

On the not so positive side, it’s nice but not really believable that Kevin successfully mediates the adult arguments going on between all the different agencies and governments that get involved in this. The build-up is different and refreshing, but the resulting alien invasion scheme was old in 1950 and, of course, nothing at all gets solved in this book, which likely just serves as the intro to Book II of the Invasion Chronicles. There are a couple of plot holes, which may or may not be explained later. And also, the fact that everybody is lurching around like a zombie at the end of this sort of undermines Kevin’s “I told you so” moment.

Three stars.

Review of “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory

This novelette is a finalist for the 2019 Hugo Awards. It was published by Tor.com in September 2018. This review contains major spoilers.

On a day in 1975, LT is ten years old. His mother wakes him to watch meteor showers, but something else happens, too, canisters falling from the sky with seeds that take root and sprout strange, invasive plants. In 1976, his mother has a new boyfriend and brings home a fern man in a pot. LT names it Slo Mo, and it soon gets too big so it has to go live with his dad. In 1978, a thistle cloud overtakes East Tennessee, blotting out the sunlight. Angered by an argument, LT’s dad tries to shove Slo Mo into the fireplace but it survives. In 1981, LT’s mom takes him to see the Dragon Tails, alien plants growing in Arizona. In 1986, drunk with his friends, LT wonders where the space bees are? How do the plants propagate without bees? In 1994, LT and his husband Doran adopt an Indonesian baby daughter they name Christina. Agriculture has failed in Indonesia because of the alien plants, and people are starving. In 2007, LT is reading to Christina and their son Carlos when his dad’s neighbor calls and tells him he needs to check on his dad. The house has been overtaken with vines, and inside Slo Mo is pressing against the roof. His dad has cancer, and LT and Doran make plans to move him into their house. At Thanksgiving in 2028, Christina announces that her research team has found a bacteria is evolving that will consume some of the alien plants. There is a potential for these bacteria to become part of the human gut flora, which would make the alien plants edible for people. In 2062, LT is ninety-seven. Doran is gone, but his family is still around him.

On the positive side, this is well-written, warm, slightly wry and very inclusive. At the risk of dissing East Tennessee, LT’s parents seem fairly typical. Mom has serial boyfriends and dad is God-fearing fundamentalist, but LT and Doran still manage to put together a nice, normal marriage and a great family. The dates in the story make up a Fibonacci series, like the spirals made by the Dragon Tails or a nautilus, and give us glimpses into LT’s life as the alien invasion takes root and grows. At the end of his life, LT is assured that his children will survive.

On the not so positive side, the story structure leaves us as mere observers skipping through the years. We can assume LT’s dad dies of his cancer, but there’s no info on what happens to Doran and Slo Mo. The plants apparently wreak havoc, but we don’t experience any of this, just a brief storm of thistles and vague reports of people starving in Indonesia. LT and Doran seem to have a comfortable life. Nobody really does anything that produces a solution to the problem except the lowly bacteria, mutating away in the background to take advantage of a new opportunity.

Three and a half stars.

Review of Fire Ant by Jonathan P. Brazee

This novella is a finalist for the 2018 Nebula Awards. It is military SF/space opera and Book 1 of the series The Navy of Humanity: Wasp Squadron. It runs 154 pages, and was published by Semper Fi. This review contains spoilers.

Floribeth Salinas O’Shea Dalisay flies a tiny Hummingbird craft and is employed as an exploration pilot by the corporation Hamdani Brothers (HB), which scouts for habitable Alpha worlds and sets wormhole gates. When Floribeth enters the SG-4021 system, she immediately thinks she’s going to get a bonus to send back to her family, but before she can do a detailed assessment of the apparent Alpha world, she is attacked by an unknown spacecraft. There was no gate in this system when she arrived, so that has to be an alien craft. Floribeth fries her AI so she can pilot the craft herself and manages to escape through some fairly reckless flying, then destroys the gate she set behind her. Her managers at HB are not amused. They refuse to believe her story and fine her a huge amount for the lost gate and damage to her Hummingbird’s AI. However, Floribeth is approached by members of the ruling class who are interested in her experience and offer her an opportunity to qualify as a Wasp flyer in the Royal Navy. Can she make the grade?

There was a moment when Floribeth was detained by the HB company that I thought this was going to be a thriller, but Brazee opts for the experiential instead. This has the same warm, positive, you-can-do-it values as other of Brazee’s work I’ve reviewed, and you get to ride along with Floribeth as she outruns the aliens, then proves herself in training and in space battles as a recruit for the Royal Navy–even though she’s unusually tiny and sort of old to be changing careers like that. She has to overcome prejudice from her superiors and fellow flyers because her hasty advancement makes her look like a political appointment. This shakes her confidence a little, but in response she only resolves to work harder. I notice there are a couple more novellas already on Amazon from this series, so I expect there is a certain amount of bad politics in the future that will connect the space battles and keep things going.

On the not so positive side, we get almost nothing about the aliens in this installment and nothing about a possible political opposition that could strengthen the plot. Floribeth has two encounters with the apparent aliens in space, but there’s no description of their craft and their weapons seem to be very similar to the Royal Navy’s. We have no idea what they want, and these still might be renegades of some kind—I’m not totally convinced.

Three and a half stars.

Review of Blindsight by Peter Watts

I enjoyed The Freeze Frame Revolution, so I thought I’d try a couple of Watt’s older novels. Blindsight is Book #1 of the Firefall Series. It was released by Tor in October 2006 and runs 294 pages. It is seriously hard SF and was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 2007. This review contains spoilers.

In 2082 a mysterious array circles the Earth and flashes, seemingly taking readings of some kind. Then an old space probe picks up a signal from a distant comet. Earth sends out fresh probes, then mounts an expedition, sending a live crew of transhumans on the ship Theseus to investigate. They include a super-intelligent vampire recreated by paleogenetics, a linguist with multiple personalities, and a combat specialist, a biologist and a synthesist augmented with electronic implants. There are other crew in ship’s storage in case of loss. The ship’s AI bypasses the comet and follows the signal to the Oort Cloud, where the crew wakes from hibernation to find a gas giant too small to ignite into a star, orbited by some massive artifact under construction. They board the artifact and take “samples” of the alien life forms, bring them back to Theseus and try to analyze their biology, intelligence and use of language. Quickly they find themselves under a terrifying counterattack. Can they destroy the alien artifact? Get word of what they’ve found back to Earth?

I’ve been asking for science fiction with more ideas. So, here it is. The plot in this novel mainly serves as a vehicle for theme and discussion, and the main theme seems to be alienness. Our protagonist is Siri Keeton, the synthesist, who lost half his brain to a childhood illness and had it replaced with electronics. He experiences no emotion and has no feel for real social interactions, mimicking behavior patterns instead. The other crew members are also radically different from baseline humans, and the aliens on the artifact are orders of magnitude different. We get some character development as background for the crew, but this serves mainly to point out the pressures and results of transhuman advancement. There is also an ongoing discussion on the nature of intelligence and consciousness.

Negatives: The worst problem here is with readability. The plot is actually very thin for the length of the novel, and Watts fills up the pages mostly with description and discussion. This makes the narration very dense and the story hard to get into. There’s no fun or adventure here; it’s all very cerebral, nihlist and disturbing–I had higher hopes for the future of humanity. Watts tends to belabor the points, too, forcing the characters to come to them in successive stages. As he points out in the acknowledgements, these are hardly warm, fuzzy characters, either, which makes it hard to care about what he’s saying. He gets points for brilliance in the ideas, but loses audience on the execution.

Four stars.

Review of Venom (2018 movie)

This movie is from the Sony Marvel universe. (If you’re wondering what that is, Sony owns the rights to about 900 Marvel characters.) It was written by Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, directed by Ruben Fleischer and stars Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed. It was released by Columbia Pictures on 5 October 2018. (Yeah, I know. I’m running really behind again.) This review contains spoilers.

Eddie Brock is a reporter who has a show with a major network. He gets an interview with the head of Life Foundation Carlton Drake. Brock’s fiancé Ann Weyling is an attorney working to defend the Life Foundation against charges of improper human trials. Told to conduct a low key interview, Brock asks about the trials case instead. He loses his job, and worse, Ann loses hers. She is furious, gives him his ring back and starts dating a surgeon. Meanwhile, Drake is conducting space flights where he has collected aliens who need a symbiote in order to survive on Earth. Drake is signing homeless people up for trials where he infects them with the symbiote, but they just die because of immune rejection. Dr. Dora Skirth, one of Drake’s employees, calls Brock and brings him to the facility to show him what’s going on. Brock becomes infected with an alien that calls itself Venom. Venom confides that it is part of an invasion force, but it likes Earth the way it is, so will oppose the planned invasion. Drake also becomes successfully infected and readies a spacecraft to bring the rest of the invasion force to Earth, but Brock/Venom destroys the rocket with Drake aboard. Is Ann infected, too? Will she star in a sequel?

This is a watchable movie, but not highly engaging or exciting. Everybody does their part, the screenwriters, the stars, the CGI techs, etc. There are great themes, alien invasion, evil scientists experimenting on the homeless, a moral opposition—but it just didn’t quite get there. I think the problem is that nobody in the movie is more than ordinarily attractive, and the alien Venom is downright ugly. Plus the film is too short to include much of a struggle between Brock and the powerful Venom for control of their relationship. This should have been the central issue. Venom just seems to decide out of the blue that it likes it here and doesn’t want any more of his race trashing up the environment. In the comic, Venom is historically cast as a bad guy, and this screenplay just didn’t make up for its unlovable qualities.

Stan Lee did put in an appearance. Don’t leave before the credits. There’s a post-credits scene where Brock goes to a maximum security prison to interview serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), who may be Carnage in a planned sequel. There’s also a post-credit scene from the upcoming Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Three stars.