Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brainycat's 5 Bs (1-5, 5 highest):
boobs: 2
blood: 5
bombs: 5
bondage: 1
blasphemy: 5

I effin' love this book series. I could not put this book down. Sandman Slim is a fantastic antihero, and I put him into the same pantheon of awesomeness as Takeshi Kovacs. He's that troubled, conflicted, smarmy, quick-witted and lethal. This book is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny all the way through, both the cynical observations of human nature and the banter between the characters is classic. Kadrey did a superior job of blending the occult into the mundane Los Angeles, and does a good job of making sure the focus of the story doesn't get disappeared into extraneous details about one or the other.

Unfortunately, I don't have a very deep or broad understanding of the history of the noir genre, but I know enough to know that Kadrey has paid homage where homage is due and added his own punk rock sensibilities into the mix. A fantastic combination of the classic revenge story mixed with the Sam Spade-ish "kickin' a** and taking names" while trying to figure out exactly who's manipulating who while he tries to find the truth of his situation. This does not read like a mystery, though, as much as it reads as a thriller.

The pace of the book is impeccable, and I think with the right direction and judicious screenwriting it would translate well to the screen. It takes place in moden LA, and since Hollywood is really good at making movies about LA, it shouldn't be too hard to pull off. On one hand, the book never really challenged me like Great Literature, but on the other hand it never takes itself that seriously. It's just a rollicking good thriller infused with punk rock, Enochian biblical occultism and offhand references to pop culture. The first person narrative actually works well for a visual, expository experience - but the narrative doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary detail.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to fans of the occultish antihero type.

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Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Oh thank god I finally finished this series. Books like this are why I should get help for my OCD, was there a deep rooted childhood trauma that my mind believes it can heal if I finish reading a series of books, even though the finale is as predictable as a sunrise and the characterization is as flat and lifeless as a squirrel in the middle of a freeway?

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Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Everything I said about The Hunger games holds true for Catching Fire as well, perhaps even more so. Except the part about the snappy pace. In short, it doesn't build on the foundation of Hunger Games, but instead coasts along on HG's efforts. Actually, it was rather forgettable, as many middle books in trilogies are. It's important for me to remember this is YA fiction, and shouldn't be held to the same standards of sex and violence I usually read.

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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I agree with everything Maciek says about this book, but I'm going to be a little more gentle with my rating because it's self-described as a book for teens.

I'm the type of reader who's never complained about too much explicit violence and/or sex in a book. I went into this series expecting there to be little of either, given that it's aimed at the teen crowd. My predictions were correct. There's a lot of sappy angst that seems to go on and on, but as I recollect my years as a teen, they were sappy and full of angst and seemed to go on and on.

What I liked about this story is that the protagonist is a capable young woman, and the plot moves along briskly enough that while I didn't get very much visceral enjoyment from the story, I did enjoy the tactical plot developments. I liked enough that I read the rest of the series, anyway.

Also, my young cousins have all read the books and now I have something to talk to them about.

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The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Usually I like the first books in a series the best. In the Laundry series, Charles Stross has absolutely left the best for last. The ending wrapped up a little too neatly, but that's ok because one does not read this series for intensive navel-gazing, but rather tongue-in-cheek hardcore nerd humor mixed with the most ridiculously (im)plausible occult scenarios.

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Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Brainycat's 5 B's

boobs:2 // blood:2 // bombs:1 // bondage:3 // blasphemy:1

For a story about a sacred prostitute, blessed by the god of vengeance and redemption with the gift of perfect masochism set in a fantasy world teetering on a full scale war of succession, there was a sad and disappointing lack of sex and violence. It was a decent story; I finished all 1280 ereader screens but I won't be reading any more of the saga. Truth be told, they could probably shave a couple of hundred of pages by condensing all the ridiculously long french and gaelic inspired names. The names of the supporting characters were very challenging for me - I couldn't sound them out properly, so I couldn't keep them straight in my head.

Generally, this wasn't too much trouble, as there aren't a lot of scenes with more than two or three big players. Despite reaching for The Heights of Epic Fantasy, and exceeding the Minimum Words requirement, this is a story about one person, and the other people exist only to push and pull her along the path set out so long ago by the likes of Tolkien, etc. The worldbuilding was 'meh'; another varnished copy of feudal Europe. Magic doesn't have as big a place in the story as faith does, further driving the characterization towards internal dimensions rather than the broad horizons and intricate plots of Martin or Jordan styled fantasy.

This was an exceptionally wordy book that borrows liberally from the french, gaelic and olde english vocabularies, and everytime I felt like I was getting into the groove of the tone and voice I got jolted by some turn of phrase that didn't fit. One glaring example that sticks with me is the use of 'meter' to describe the height of a statue, when every other dimension in the book was described in relative terms. Also, while I know more than I could every possibly care about what people were wearing and the colors of their eyes, I don't know anything about the quirks and details of any of the main characters. The author did a better job describing the thread holding each dress together than the handedness of our heroine and her companions. Despite providing us with the recipe of every dish in every lavish meal, I know nothing about the cutlery or table settings. After a while, it felt like lazy writing, like the author only cares about clothes and food. Imagine a huge painting where 7/8 of the painting is a rough charcoal sketch, and 1/8 is vividly painted in pointillist detail - that's what reading this book was like. I'm sure I would've appreciated it more if the focus was on details I care more about, namely sex and violence.

I'm still undecided if the retrospective point of view was a device to keep the story moving, or a way for the author to gloss over description and world building. We definitely get inside the head of Phaedre and learn about how she feels about her childhood and adolescence; but her singular viewpoint sacrifices the internal lives of other characters and avoids illuminating the world. The more I read about this book, the more I found myself caring less about Phaedra and more about the people around her. I was hungry for their feelings and motivations, and grew a bit tired of the predictable way Phaedra reacted to the events unfolding around her.

Especially bothersome to me was the way the sadists who hired Phaedra were protrayed. This is a problem throughout BDSM oriented writing, and this book was one of the worst offenders. Most of the reason I finished the book was because I hoped she'd meet a top that wasn't just a means to an end for her. The tops described in this book were each nasty, brutish, selfish and/or otherwise undersirable. WTF? I understand that there are many, many more subs than tops in the world, and therefore marketing dictates stories should be written for them. But that doesn't mean that sadists are any less dimensional, caring or conflicted than any other human. Additionally, Phaedre's experience as a masochist is handled too gingerly by the author. Numerous times throughout the book, there were perfect opportunities to explore the intersections of desire, pleasure, pain control, servitude and disgust but they were each neatly sidestepped before any genuine intimacy could emerge. Along these lines, there was no explicit sex to speak of, but lots of sex happens and it's crucial to driving the story.

As she wanders around her country, and her country's neighbors, she has basically three assets. Firstly, her desireability. It's a given for her; asking Phaedra about what it's like to be wanted is like asking a fish to describe 'wet'. This is her principal asset in getting herself involved in the machinations of statecraft. Secondly, she's had an education and a gift for languages, so the character interacts easily with the various peoples she encounters on her travels. Ultimately, though, it's her willingness to bed the right people at the right time that helps her achieve her goals. This isn't a bad thing, don't ever let it be said that I'm not in favor of releasing sexuality into more of our lives, but the way it was presented, and because the sex wasn't explicit, I feel a real chance to illustrate how empowering sexuality can be was horribly wasted. Additionally, by not getting into the sweaty details of any of the sex that happens, perhaps the best chance to connect with the characters was lost.

This book was entertaining enough, but it's not especially engrossing or groundbreaking. The lack of dimensionality in most of the characters was disappointing and, in my mind, makes this less of an Epic Fantasy and more like "Memoirs of a Feudal European Geisha". I would recommend this book to fantasy fans who like to think about kinky sex, but not talk about it.

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Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Genre: scifi / cyberpunk
Brainycat's 5 'B's:
boobs: 4 // blood 4 // bombs 2 // bondage 1 // blasphemy 4
Currently listening to: Alien Vampires: Harshlizer CD2

Richard K. Morgan has again established himself as one of my very mostest all time favorite authors. As a reader, I've often gone through endless numbers of book descriptions online, or browsed the shelves at bookstores, and felt like nobody is writing a book just for me. Sure, there's more 'good' or even 'great' books out there that I'd enjoy than I'll ever have time to read. But even when I'm reading a great book that I can really get into, I still have a nagging reservation, a slight cognitive disconnect between myself and the characters in the book: "What kind of idiot are they? Why didn't they do it the other way? This guy is a hopeless fool. They're are much easier ways to accomplish that goal."

Carl Marsalis, genetically modified (I'd say enhanced) and trained in soldiering since birth, did not inspire that sort of dissonance with me. I get this guy. I understand his mental processes. He has to explain himself over and over to the "normal" humans around him why he does the things he does, and each time I feel his frustration. The premise of the character is that he's a "variant 13", the result of manipulating the genome to express neural structures and personality traits advantageous to a hunter/gather society, but subsequently bred out in the intervening 20000 years of agricultural domestication and raised in an off-the-record creche remniscent of the movie Soldier.

Those who know me well will not be the least bit surprised to find me so attracted to Carl. I'm a big believer in the concept that we, as modern humans, have sold ourselves short. We've paid for our cushy lifestyles with domestication and the yoke of civilization, at the cost of the raw animal passion that sits at the bottom of our brainpans. Where once we fought for tribal dominance with cunning, strength and self-control, we now blithely hand the reigns of our tribe over to a succession of talking heads who make reassuring noises on cue - and in turn to the people who've inherited the keys to the graineries. Two professionals, one a highlevel bureaucrat who works with genemodified populations, the other a detective who runs across them in his work, talk about the nature of the Variant 13:

Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look—by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough, and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.”

Where the other books I've read by Morgan play in the space between then and now, in the gap between what you remember, what other people remember and those intersections today, this book plays in the social space between people and their perceptions of each other in the here and now. This is not another "frozen caveman wakes up and hilarity ensues" story. This book takes the old joke "Stress is the feeling created when the mind overrides the body's desire the choke the shit out of some asshole who deserves it" and treats it with respect, thoughtfullness and integrity. Carl is not a neolithic, thoughtless killing machine. Like all of Richard's characters, he has depth and breadth that keep this character driven story moving along at a fast clip.

Nature versus nurture is the glaring subtext of this story. To this end, prejudice and bigotry play a big part in the dark future of "Thirteen". On one hand, there's the overt bigotry of "jesusland", secessionist southern states and their teaparty agenda writ large. In this context, Carl experiences bigotry because of the color of his skin. He experiences bigotry because of the years he spent on the Mars colony. He experiences legislated bigotry at the hands of various nation-states and corporate entities throughout Europe and both north and south america because of his geneprint.

Carl lifted fingertips to his face, brushed at his cheekbones. “You see this? When you’re a variant, people don’t look at this. They go right through the skin, and all they see is what’s written into your double helix.”
The Rim cop shrugged. “Perhaps you’d prefer them to stop at the skin. What I hear about the old days, we’re both the wrong color for that to be a better option. Would you really prefer it the way things were? A dose of good old-fashioned skin hate?”

At the best of times, he occupies a legal grey area; he's able to avoid incarceration or being sent back to Mars because he works as a bounty hunter, licensed to track and capture or kill other 13s who escape from their holding areas. The other characters in the story, each of which are extraordinarily well developed, also deal with their own prejudices towards Carl as well their own lives as the object of other people's prejudices.

As I've come to expect from Richard K. Morgan, non-white, non-male and non-straight characters are very well represented in this story. It is positively refreshing to see capital-s Speculative Fiction finally write stories that actually featrure the people who are likely to populate the world of the future. As these characters deal with their relationship to Carl, each other and themselves they each explore the difference between how they believe they should relate to Carl, the world and themselves, and ultimately have to discover for themselves where the line between limbic imperative and imprinted behavior lies. Carl has postcoital conversation with a colleague who inherited a geneset called "bonobo", designed to make women more overtly sexual:

“You know what it feels like, Marsalis? Constantly testing your actions against some theory of how you think you might be supposed to behave. Wondering, every day at work, every time you make a compromise, every time you back up one of your male colleagues on reflex, wondering whether that’s you or the gene code talking.” A sour smile in Carl’s direction. “Every time you fuck, the guy you chose to fuck with, even the way you fuck him, all the things you do, the things you want to do, the things you want done to you. You know what it feels like to question all of that, all the time?”
He nodded. “Of course I do. You just pretty much described where I live.”

Watching each character deal with these identity issues was the real crux of the book for me; it resonated deeply in my own experiences with alchoholism.

This is Science Fiction at it's absolute finest. It uses the latest information added to the corpus of knowledge we've accumulated, extrapolates the interesting bits, hurls it full force into geopolitics and wraps it all up in a thrilling story that had me staying up late and foregoing other obligations to read. I was utterly engrossed in this book. This book shows that Richard is continuing to develop himself as both a writer and a social critic (read "artist") even after the phenomenal achievement of the Takeshi Kovacs series. Earlier this year I said about Altered Carbon "...if you read only one scifi book this year, make sure it's Altered Carbon," but I'm going to have to rescind that statement. Thirteen is one of those Important Achievements that needs to be read by anyone who has an interest in the human condition, the ability of people to grow and change, and ultimately decide their own fates with whatever cards chance - and bioengineering - have handed them.

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Spin State by Chris Moriarty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Genre: Science Fiction (post-human, far dark future) / Romance
Brainycat's 5 B's:
boobs: 1 // blood: 3 // bombs: 3 // bondage: 1 // blasphemy: 2
Currently listening to: ESA "The Sea and the Silence"

Sometimes books have a singular aspect that attract their readership despite all the other failings; one thing the author got so right that all the problems with the book seem trite and easily overlooked. What Spin State got right for me was the protagonist. Catherine Li is made of pure win. She's no Takeshi Kovacs, mind you, but that's because she's more human and fallible. I love Catherine. She profoundly reminds me of myself. Like Catherine, I have numerous large gaps in my memory that I have to work around on a daily basis. I wish I could say mine were from something as exotic as quantum travel, but unfortunately mine come from a disastrously terrible childhood and a 25 year long relationship with alchohol. I, too, have my secrets that I try so hard to keep, so hard that the size and shape of what I don't talk about must be clear to everyone around me. I keep my heart closed and find ways to avoid entangling my feelings with other people, even people who offer me their unconditional love. I've done things I'm ashamed of and wish I could undo and forget. I use my wit to forge my simmering rage into a scathing snarkiness designed to keep everyone around me at arm's length.

And just like myself, Catherine refuses to feel regret. Catherine owns her foibles and her strengths. She owns up to everything she's done, every decision she's made. She's not proud of everything she's done, but she takes responsibility for the way she's lived her life and the decisions she's made and has no patience for anyone who tries to judge her. Long before we meet her as she prepares to lead a raid into an illegal bioware researach lab, Catherine had made the decision to live her life on her own terms with no apologies to anyone else, doing what she feels is best for her.

This book crosses a lot of genres, but I don't know if it really nails any of them. I guess that makes it "literature" or something; I'll leave it to the publicists to decide what they want to put on the dust jacket. This book is a romance wrapped up in a detective story set in a far dark future. With capital "s" Science scattered around inside it. Everything we know about how quantum entanglement works is vividly illustrated in this book. However, I don't know if I'd call this a "hard science fiction" book. Science does not drive the story. The conflict and resolution arcs are all intra and interpersonal. As far as my understanding goes, the science is accurate but I can't say that any new conceptualizations of the ramifications of quantum physics were illustrated. This book is not of the intellectual density I've come to expect from (for example) Charles Stross.

After the introductory scene that doesn't tell but shows us that Catherine is a valuable pawn in the interstellar war between "humans" - people born with randomly recombinated genes from two parents and "constructs" - people born from artificial wombs and tailored genesets. Catherine's genetics put her in a grey legal area. She was born on Compson's World in a creche with a set of genes designed to optimize her body for the mining of Bose-Einstein crystals, but she had her genes altered so she could join the human UN military and begin a career far and away from the victorian-esque inequalities of her homeworld.

The third powerbase in this universe are the emergent artificial intelligences. Some of them hundreds of years old, they've grown so complex they've aquired a computational equivalence of self-awareness and what philosophers have historically referred to as "consciousness". The AIs are strictly regulated by the UN and feared, albeit to a slightly lesser degree, by the constructs. Every emergent AI has a failsafe loopback built into their code, allowing human operators to break apart their networks if the AI gets "out of hand".

Bose-Einstein crystals are the most valuable substance in the universe and the technological focalpoint of the story. The crystals occur naturally, deep in coal deposits on Compson's World, a planet at the edge of known human space but at the center of the human's economic engines. The crystals are entangled with each other, allowing information to exist simultaneously in crystals that are split apart into smaller pieces. This is the technology that allows the UN to maintain control of most of the known worlds. With their monopoly on the ability to move information (and everything is information in the quantum world - including physical objects) instantly across the galaxy, they maintain strategic superiority over the handful of construct controlled worlds.

But enough about the world. It's well thought out in that "human nature won't change even when technology does" sort of way. Capitalism is still the state-sponsored economic system, with it's attendant inequalites and short sighted policies. It all hangs together and 'gels' though we really don't see very much of it, as most of the story takes place on Compson's World or in the "spinstream", the quantum entangled heir to cyberspace.

Against this verge-of-post-human backdrop, the real story happens. Relationships drive the story, and the internal life of Catherine is where all the important struggles take place. The first relationships we see are to her team of hardened warriors. She feels protective of them; she is able to freely admit her feelings to herself when the objects of her affection don't expect anything from her other than for her to do her job. We also meet Cohen, the most personable of the AIs, who enjoys experiencing the world through human "shunts", people who allow him to take over their bodies and temporarily replace their minds with his own. After the introductory fiasco, we meet Helen Nguyen who is Catherine's superior officer. Helen sends Catherine to her homeworld to find out why Hannah Sharifi, who discovered how to make quantum entanglement practical, died under mysterious circumstances while researching the Bose-Einstein crystals. Catherine begins her investigation and runs into the following characters that, while dressed up for this particular dance, have been around for quite a while:
1) The perverted, sadistic executive who's skimming off the top of the till
2) His psychopathic security agent
3) The helpless damsel in distress who tugs at Catherine's heartstrings to get what she wants
4) The earnest young officer full of optimism who plays by the rules to advance his career
5) Salty old miners who remember her father and grudgingly offer her a modicum of respect based on his memory

This is a pretty standard setup for what becomes a pretty standard scifi/detective plot. As I was reading the story, I kept thinking, "This is what they did in all those other books." and "That same problem happens (everytime there's a clandestine EVA)" and "This character is just like every other character in this position and setting." Honestly, the action and detective parts of the plot feel derivative. Maybe I've read too much cyberpunk. Maybe I'm expecting too much. The ultimate groaner moment for me was when Cohen allows Catherine's consciousness into his internal networks. How is the AI's mind described? Cohen creates a virtual house, each room off a long hallway representing a part of himself, and each object in the room representing a dataset. Yawn. I've only seen that a million times before; it's so overdone Hollywood has even put it into film.*

As the story progresses, Catherine is caught between her loyalty to Helen and her attraction to Cohen. Though it's not clear to Catherine until much later in the book (with a thorny rose analogy - ohpleasegawdmakeitstop) Cohen is utterly smitten with Catherine and is probably the one character that actually has Catherine's best interests at heart. Everyone but Catherine sees this from about page thirty onwards. Their mutual arcs intersect when Cohen has to inhabit wetware implanted into Catherine so Catherine can carry Cohen to meet a semisentient emergent AI that doesn't have any network access (again, more of the overused cyberpunk tropes) and Catherine can't handle the interface. After a long heart to heart and nearly kissing (thepaininmyheart itachesitaches) Catherine comes to understand that she has to open herself and her feelings and experiences to Cohen, and allow herself to be truly intimate with him. Not for her sake, or for the sake of their years-long, on again off again relationship, but so they can complete their mission. Of course once she opens up to him (she just needed to meet the right guy?) all is milk and honey and they're wildly in love with each other tilldeathdotheypart.

They manage to complete their mission together, double crosses are crossed, people die, tears and gnashing of teeth ensue. Until the story finally wraps up in a climax that should've been obvious to anyone who's ever read a story involving emergent AIs many, many pages ago. The denouement is mercifully short, and puts the reader exactly where you expected the story to end - the surprise twists are only surprising to Catherine, not to the reader.

But I liked this book. Simply because the characterization is awesome. The auther excells at using dialogue to hint at internal motivations and conflicts, drawing feelings not with a wide brush but rather a pointillism that is succinct and believable. The story is shown to the reader, rather than told, and the command of the language is refreshing. Neither windy like China Mieville nor terse and hammery like Gibson's earlier works, it flows naturally and is a pleasure to read. Cohen is believable as an AI, and I think his character captures the essence of masculinity very well. He is the perfect counterpoint to Catherines hard-edged ("thorny") over-the-top femininity. The story moves in relationships, flowing through dialogue that is witty and well honed. Every character has a unique, believable voice that makes the setting fall away like background chatter in an restaurant.

If I weren't such a lazy reviewer, I'd find some quotes to illustrate my points. Instead, I'm going to wrap this up and recommend that you read the book - not as a scifi adventure, but as a romance with a strong (brittle) warrior heroine and the man who's wise enough not to change her, or try to box her in, but instead let her be herself and come to him on her own terms.

*brainycat's first law of creativity in scifi: "Hollywood is phobic of innovation, therefore anything they commit to film is already old, worn out, overused and boring."

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Grants Pass by Jennifer Brozek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

keywords: horror, post-apocalyptic, bioterrorism, plague, anthology
brainycat's "5 Best B"s (on a scale of one to five):
boobs: 1 / blood 3 / bombs 2 / bondage 1 / blasphemy 3

Grant's Pass is an excellent concept anthology that I enjoyed reading. The authors of each of the twenty pieces were provided with the following scenario: Bioterrorists unleash plagues across the globe that leave a survival rate of 0.001 percent. While the plagues were buring through the population, a blog post written by a young woman goes viral. This post, written before the plagues started, is a letter to her friends asking them to meet her in Grant's Pass, Oregon if the world comes to an end. Each of the stories in this book are about characters deciding to go to Grant's Pass, trying to get to Grant's Pass or trying to keep people from going to Grant's Pass. The city becomes an analogy for hope and community, for safety and a chance at reconnecting with people assumed lost during the plague.

I really, really like post-apocalyptic stories. Like most fans, I enjoy imagining myself as a survivor and I put myself into the desolation and destruction,  daydreaming about a world without deadlines, traffic, bills or legions of stupid people; where my wits and my physicality are the difference between life and death - every day. I also daydream about people in extraordinary circumstances. What if I were far from home when the extinction even occurs? How will the infrastructure (power, water, sewage, internet) fall apart? What about researchers in Antarctica or isolated cultures living the way they have for thousands of years deep in the rainforest? What is the mathematical model to determine if a group of survivors are open and welcoming to strangers or likely to subjugate or kill people who come across them? These are the things that I think about when I'm staring off into space. I can divine how cynical I'm feeling at any given time by the answers I provide for myself.

And these are the questions posed by in this collection. As with other post-apocalyptic books, a major theme throughout most of the stories can be summed up with a Rousseau-ean supposition: When the chains of civilization are broken, how do free people behave? Some of the answers gave Stacey nightmares. I don't disagree with her assesment that people are capable of doing amazingly horrific things to each other when there's little to no liklihood of reprisal (eg Animal Husbandry by Seanan McGuire, The Few That Are Good by Scott Ames, and Men of Faith by Ivan Ewert). Each of the characters in those stories believe they are forced into their actions by the conditions they're in and are totally justified in everything they do, leaving the reader mute witness to the downward spiral into madness and anarchy the characters throw themselves. If I didn't get nightmares but instead felt entertained, it's because I'm a cold heartless bastard.

"Somebody once wrote 'Hell is the impossibility of reason'", and by this measure some of these stories are truly hellish. I'm not speaking of the nature of the plagues; this is not a medical thriller and the editors made a better-than-half-assed-attempt at making the science plausible, so I'm willing to buy into the disease etiology. Some of the stories explore an alienation and dysphoria so overwhelming that we watch the characters' psyches splinter apart and flutter like so many tiny pieces of confetti in the wind. The character quirks and oddities that endear us to our friends today can become the faultlines that rupture and bring us down in times of stress, and this idea is explored especially well in Final Edition by Jeff Parish, Ink Blots by Amanda Pillar, By The Sea by Shannon Page, Hell's Bells by Cherie Priest and especially The Discomfort of Words by Carole Johnstone. Perhaps egomaniaclly, I didn't especially relate to any of these protagonists, but rather enjoyed watching their descent into madness from a smug perch, confident (hubristically) that I'm stronger than they are.

Is it the responsibility of every survivor to keep clawing at life, fending off the extinction of the human species for as long as possible, or is it every person's responsibility to make their death have meaning? Can anyone's death, or life, mean anything when total extinction is just a few years away? This is an important question, and is being wrestled with today (albeit in a wildly differnt context) in the debates around assisted suicide. For the staff trapped in orbit on the International Space Station, it's not an abstract question and Martin Livings provides his answers in Ascension. Jennifer Brozek also broaches the idea in The Chateau de Mons, and the most romantic story in the collection Rights of Passage by Pete Kempshall shows this choice is not always one's own to make.

Ultimately, the post-apocalyptic genre is about showing us hope. In the personal sense, we each hope that we would survive an apocalyptic even and as readers we hope the protagonists survive their disasters. Exploring stories like this allows us to explore the banal cruelty humans can so casually commit, which makes kindnesses, small and large, seem so much more significant. Hope and the redemption of the social fabric we know today are powerful motivators for heroes and antiheroes alike, and they drive several stories including An Unkindness of Ravens by Stephanie Gunn, Boudha by K.V. Taylor, A Newfound Gap by Lee Clarke Zumpe, Black Heart White Mourning by Jay Lake and especially A Perfect Night to Watch Detroit Burn by Ed Greenwood.

I thoroughly enjoyed this anthology. It's not just another "driving around the burning remains of North America with a truck full of guns" fantasy, it's a collection of thought provoking and intelligent short stories bound together by a brilliant concept. The writing is consistently solid through the book; while none of the stories struck me as drop-what-you're-doing-and-read-this-now caliber, the lack of weak pieces elevates the overall average and made it very easy to get through the book. I got the .azw from Amazon, and somewhere between it's production and my converting to epub enough formatting errors showed up that it was a bit distracting, and there were several typos. I say this because it triggered my OCD, but at no point were any of the pieces unreadable. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys horror and post-apocalyptic fiction with an intelligent, emotional edge to it.

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Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked up this book on a recommendation as a book that features it's urban setting as an integral character in the story. When I looked at the synopsis, I was glad to see it's a Far Dark Future-y cyberpunky sort of story. It's not like all the other cyberpunk books I've read; the prose is some weird amalgam of stream-of-conscious meets futurewords-without-enough-context. It read like some Important Modern Literature I've seen (and subsequently loathed). I believe our main character, or at least the one who's point of view has most of the words for the part I read, is a starving artist and he's telling me that he's telling me about something that happened to him. That was not a typo back there - the character is actually making a point of saying (over and over) that he's telling me a story. First of all, I'm not a fan of books that address me directly. It's a gimmicky device that's only useful in a small number of (mostly humorous) contexts. Books are for being written and being read, and I'd like to keep the conversation between myself and the author in my very own head, thank you very much. If you want to have a dialogue with me, send me an email or write me a note on a forum; otherwise, stick to writing your story and we'll get along fine. I provide this sentence as exemplary of the way the author uses lots of words and punctuation without saying anything meaningful:

So, since Shadrach certainly wouldn't move in to protect me and my art from the cold pricklies of destruction - I mean, I couldn't go it alone; I had this horrible vision of sacrificing my ceramics, throwing them at future Pick Dicks because the holo stuff wouldn't do any harm of a physical nature (which made me think, hey, maybe this holo stuff is Dead Art, too, if it doesn't impact on the world when you throw it) - since that was Dead Idea, I was determined to go down to Quin's Shanghai Circus (wherever that was) and "git me a meerkat," as those hokey nuevo Westerns say. A meerkat for me, I'd say, tall as you please. Make it a double. In a dirty glass cage. (Oh, I'd crack myself up if the Pick Dicks hadn't already. Tricky, tricky pick dicks.)

Right about the time I was telling myself, "I'm going to give this book 5% more to figure out how to talk to me, or I'm giving up on it" there's a chapter break and the POV changes. I usually don't like POV changes; it's fine to move between characters but please don't change the narrative POV you're approaching the characters with unless you have a really good reason and you know what you're doing. I never found the former and I'm not convinced of the latter. The narrative changed to second person POV.

I.Fucking.Hate.Second.Person.POV.

I hate it in my bones. The very fiber of my essence quivers with revulsion when my eyes scan second person POV with a disgust that is born of the irrationality that can only be fostered by a childhood full of abuse. Second person narrative makes me throw up in my mouth a little. I don't doubt for a moment that authors feel passionately about their work and they put an amazing amount of effort into writing a book, but that doesn't mean anybody, anywhere, anytime, gets to tell me "You feel (something), you think (something)." I reserve that right for myself alone. The author is more than welcome to try and manipulate my feelings and intellect, but I and I alone get to tell me what I feel and think. The prose doesn't improve much with the change in POV, either. The irony of the following selection is that it's the loser artist's sister talking about the loser artist we met in the first quote, but it could just as easily be talking about the prose:

You can still hear Nick's sentences, but you don't want to complete them, for they are monstrous, guttural creations, and they reek of blood. They are not the constructions of the Nick you know, the Nick who loves the Canal District for its many-layered conversations, the deals being made, the mysterious magic of it that defies easy definition.

That was right about where I knew this book and I did not have a future together. I soldiered on for the remainder of my cigarette, glued to my reader like a bystander at a trainwreck and found this gem that, again, could describe my thoughts about this book:

Another week passes into gray oblivion. You're a slow dream, an autumn freeze, a ship in the doldrums. Thoughts come slow and ponderous, like deep-sea fish floating heavy and memory-bound to the surface; coelacanth reborn.

Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the book. I suppose it isn't poorly written, it's just written in a way that really turns me off. No doubt there's a worthwhile story lurking in the craggy depths of those murky sentences, like coelecanths waiting to be discovered long after they were written off. I'm willing to let other people find it.

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