The Book(s): Midnight Riot and Moon over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch.
The Plot(s):  In Midnight Riot, (also known as Rivers of London), Probationary Constable Peter Grant learns that his superiors have decided he’ll never make a good Copper, and have decided to assign him to the CPU, the data entry arm of the London Met.  However, following a bizarre murder where a man has his head literally knocked off, Constable Grant discovers two things simultaneously: that Ghosts, gods, magic, and all the other obscure arcana of the world are real; and that he is uniquely qualified to become the first official apprentice wizard in fifty years.

In Moon over Soho, Grant continues his career as Britain’s newest apprentice wizard, and assists his boss, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, in tracking down a bevy of new magical crimes: a woman with vagina dentata, a coven of jazz vampires, and what may be one of a secret cabal of black magicians, trained by one of the last surviving of Nightingale’s contemporaries and content to use their powers for cruel and malicious purposes.

So what did I think?

This is a two-fer, for a few reasons:  the books are by the same author, I read them back to back, and they were both fairly short.  This is only the second series that could be termed urban fantasy that I really have enjoyed, and I discovered these books via a recommendation by the author of the previously-reviewed book, The Apocalypse Codex.  He recommended this series of books to anyone who liked the Laundry, and I bought this book and Declare by Tim Powers at the same time.  I had heard that Declare was a fairly heavy book, a sort of Le Carre-meets-Cthulhu mashup, and had no desire for a heavy book after just having read Bitter Seeds (review forthcoming), so I decided to go with this book.

After finishing Midnight Riot I immediately bought the second book, Moon over Soho, via the nook store and started reading it.  This gives you some idea of how much I enjoyed this book.  It’s a fun read, and even though some of the events that PC Grant experiences are horrific, Grant is an engaging narrator and has a healthy sense of humor.

Also appreciated is the fact that consequences remain from book to book.  Despite the presence of magic there are no easy outs for the characters, and they must put up with the consequences of their actions.  People are hurt, stay hurt, and recover slowly as in real life.  Grant, despite his wisecracks, is shaken by the deaths he sees, and has nightmares about many of them.  The shadow of the newly-discovered cabal of wizards hangs over the end of the book.  It’s nice to see a book that has at least a little bit of a sense of what real people would do after some of the mess that goes down in these two books.

These books are sold at mass-market paperback prices in the US, so there’s little reason not to try them.  I can’t say that I love these books with all my heart, but I liked them enough to read back-to-back, and I also liked them enough to preorder the third, which comes out on Tuesday.  Keep an eye out, because with the 3rd book coming out in less than a week it is possible Amazon or B&N are going to do some sort of promotional sale, cutting the price of the first two books by some amount in order to generate interest in the third book.

I’m not a good person to take recommendations about urban fantasy form, as the large popular series leave me cold; my preferred fantasy runs more towards Perdido Street Station than Dresden Files.  Still, I liked these books and if you like urban fantasy – or even if you don’t – I think there may be something here for you.

The Book: The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross.
The Plot Summary:  In this followup to 2010′s The Fuller Memorandum, Computational Demonologist and IT support guy Bob Howard has a new role added to his plate: that of a low-level manager.  Bob is being groomed for management in a position at the Laundry, Britain’s secret occult espionage agency dedicated to defending Her Majesty’s Realm from brain-eating nasties from beyond the stars.  Following a worrisome meeting between a born-again Pentecostal preacher and the Prime Minister,  Bob is seconded to External Assets and placed in charge of an off-the-books attempt to discover just what it is the Preacher is after… and in the process discovers a plot aimed not just at the United Kingdom, but at earth itself, even as the terrifying event called CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN draws closer…

So what did I think?

I loved it, of course.

Quick background here.  The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth book of a series called The Laundry Files, about the secret arm of British intelligence tasked with defending Her Majesty’s Realm against mind-sucking horrors from beyond space in time.  The first book, The Atrocity Archives, was a fix-up novel if i remember correctly, essentially a collection of interconnected short stories detailing the first field exploits of the aforementioned Bob Howard.  Bob finds himself propelled up the ranks on the back of his increasingly painful successes, eventually becoming assistant to Angleton, a wizard of the old school who is responsible for overseeing at least some of the Laundry’s wet work.

These books are by turns funny and bleak.  Funny because Bob hates the bureaucracy he is embedded in, and bleak because in the universe Bob inhabits, there is only One True Religion, and in the soon-to-begin CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN the dead Gods from beyond space and time will be arriving to consume humanity.  This fourth book is the first book that I recall that Stross lays out precisely why CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is about to occur, though he may have also done it in The Fuller Memorandum, the first book in the series.

This is a hard book to review in that I went in expecting to like it, and I wasn’t disappointed.  It’s even harder to review because so much of this is contingent on the first 3 books of the series.  Still, I suppose I should give it a try: Stross writes engagingly, the action is well-related, and the world building he does is interesting.  Secret History has always been something I’ve been fascinated with, in a fictional sense, so a book series that finds ways to work it like this are always a joy for me to read.  I can’t wait for the next book.  It’s just a shame that I’m going to have to wait at least two years for it…

For those of you interested, I would highly recommend you start the series from the beginning and read start to finish.  The series consists of the following:

1. The Atrocity Archives
2. The Jennifer Morgue
3. The Fuller Memorandum
4. The Apocalypse Codex

Additionally, there are several short stories set in the same universe that act as segues between the books.  There is only one I feel must be read, but if I remember correctly it is contained at the end of The Jennifer Morgue so that shouldn’t be a problem to find.  In any case, even if it isn’t, Stross has mentioned that there are plans for a collection of Laundry short stories in the future, so it may be worthwhile to simply wait for that rather than to scramble around finding out where all the other Laundry short stories are printed.

The Book:Existence by David Brin.
The Plot Summary:  A first contact tale told over the spread of many decades, Existence explores a world where the oligarchies have won and the world has stratified in to the Ten Estates.  Gerald Livingston, an astronaut on trash duty, hooks an object that turns out to be an alien probe, drifting for centuries over the limb of Earth.  What follows is a discovery that not only is man not alone in the universe, but that they have been watched and occasionally guided by alien probes carrying artilens,downloaded alien consciousnesses.

So what did I think?

This books is a disappointment in many ways.  First,  the book itself is hardly a coherent storyline.  It’s not even strictly speaking an all-new novel at all.  It’s what I believe is called a “fix-up” job, where a collection of short stories are taken and edited and partially rewritten into a novel.  In this case, many of the individual anecdotes are refugees from earlier stories, some of them decades old.  This lends the book what I think is its most objectionable feature, which is that it never quite gels as a coherent storyline.

Other reviews have given Dr. Brin serious credit for his sweeping world-building, his commitment to not taking the easy way out, and I’ve even seen a few people happy with the disappointing non-ending Brin left us with at the end of this book.  All of this strained my enjoyment of the book quite considerably, to the point where, unless you are a dedicated fan of hard science fiction, a dedicated fan of David Brin, or a dedicated fan of doing the opposite of what I suggest, I’m not sure I’d recommend this to anyone.  Certainly I feel like I had paid a little too much for this book, which was $14.99 for the Nook edition.

Many of the characters in this book are interesting, and many more of them are tense or exciting.  The issue is that so much of the book isn’t enjoyable – there are storyline which seem almost irrelevant to the book as a whole, and there are at least two considerable time-jumps which are never really developed.  Brin has decided that “more is more” is the operative word for this eight hundred page behemoth, and as a result he’s not satisfied throwing one suggested answer to the Fermi paradox at us when he can throw three at us.  Considering the detail which I remember his other books going into (though I have to admit, it’s been a while since I’ve read either of his Uplift trilogies), I found it disappointing that he decided to dangle ideas or mysteries in front of us without taking the time to explore them, especially in the latter third of the book.  What was the point of introducing characters like Seeker or the whole sequence inside a dead interstellar probe if you weren’t going to actually explore their purpose or their interactions with humanity?  So many of the dangling plot points inspire this kind of irritation in me, a sense that he took a bunch of short stories in roughly the same universe, worked hard for about half the book at linking them together, and then just sort of gave up and kept throwing them in without really integrating them properly.

By the end of this book I was ready for it to be over, and I was ready for a conclusion.  The fact that I got only one of those things after slaving away at this book for two weeks leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It made the ordeal feel so much worse that I knew that there was a book I’d love (The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross) at the end of it.

This was not a book for me.  I can’t recommend this book, nor do I particularly want to.  Still, if you’re a lover of Dr. Brin, or are willing to accept or ignore its flaws, there are some few shining moments in the roughness of this frankenbook.

Apologies for this post, but I’ve lost it to wordpress’s whimsy twice now and I’m starting to get quite bummed.

The Book: Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
The Plot Summary:  Several hundred years hence, the African Union is one of the dominant powers of the world, having succeeded India and China as the superpower of the age.  It balances itself with the Aquatic Nations, those people who have built themselves homes in and around the ocean.  Meanwhile, under the auspices of the Akinya family, humanity is spreading into space and even beginning the arduous process of terraforming Mars.  Geoffrey, one of the black sheep of the Akinya line, returns home after his grandmother dies, only to discover that her death has set in motion a series of events that might change the future of space flight for humans across the solar system.

So what did I think?

First off, here’s an amazon review of Blue Remembered Earth.

I really wanted to like this book, despite the extremely far-fetched assumption that Africa, even in the 22nd century was the Earth’s technology powerhouse. I mean the only reason they have indoor plumbing and cell phones is because their former colonial rulers gave them these gifts. It will be a depressing world indeed if Europe and the United States give up their technical leadership and cede it to the dark continent.

Despite my misgivings, I borrowed this book from my local library and gave it a shot. I just couldn’t make myself believe that Africans were going into space, so I had to stop reading it.

Well, I suppose that being a raging racist prick is one reason to dislike a book.  I was mostly shocked and depressed as it’s rare for me to run into racism this obvious any more, except if it’s being deployed for shock value… and I’m not sure this review is intentionally being shocking.  I know, I know, it’s the internet, and so on and so forth… but still.
Unfortunately, while this guy is a bigot, there is an issue with the African heroes of BRE … but it’s not the one posted above.  The issue, rather, has to do with how Mr Reynolds, a white Welshman, writes his Kenyan main characters.

One thing you’ll find if you ever read any African literature translated into English is that African literature has a rich history of celebrating the traditions of its mother continent even as it decries some of the more problematic (to put it mildly) facets of their culture.  For example, Ngugi wa Thiong’o draws deeply on African spiritualism and superstition when he wrote his book Wizard of the Crow , but it achieves a sort of authenticity – a sort of epistolary of the joys of having a history that is thousands of years old and yet still in living memory, even as it avoided or condemned things like the subjugation of women or the rampant homophobia infecting so many African nations these days.

I find it hard to believe that this tradition would have vanished in just a couple years, and yet if you take BRE ‘s world at face value that is exactly what seems to have happened.  other than the names, there is little acknowledgment of the traditions and unique cultures of Africa in the world Reynolds had crafted.  This is all the more problematic when you consider that in Reynold’s vision of the future, it is the AU which has become the leading world superpower.
So what are we supposed to believe?  Perhaps that in the future of BRE , despite the political power of Africa (and the vanishing of the Americas from the world stage almost entirely), American culture succeeded in absorbing and sublimating all other cultures?  Maybe, but if so that’s pretty weird.

Also problematical is Reynold’s Mechanism, though I think this was more intentional.  The Mechanism of BRE is a pervasive Panopticon, a distributed machine intelligence so powerful it can stop a human from committing violence before he has the chance to, say, hit his opponent.  Even more chillingly, it seems that the law – such as it is in this perfectly policed world – states that a person is guilty of a crime as long as he had intent to commit, even if it never actually happened.  The astute reader will see shades of minority Report, and I’m sure it wasn’t completely unintentional.

Despite the creeping horror you or I may feel over the idea that our entire lives would be under surveillance in this way, the characters of BRE hardly even notice it.  That, to me, is just as chilling as the Mechanism itself.  They live in a world that has conditioned them to accept and even feel safe with perpetual surveillance. Reynolds posits that Utopias can only be built with dystopian powers; and somewhat surprisingly for SF, seems to hold to the idea that in order to secure happiness and safety for all, it is necessary for some to give up their freedoms.

I haven’t touched on the storyline for BRE, and that’s because the story and the characters, while more developed than some of Reynolds’ other works, are still workmanlike at best.  the death of Geoffrey Akinya’s grandmother sets off a treasure hunt that takes he and his sister across the breadth of the solar system, culminating in a high speed flight to the Oort cloud and the discovery of a secret of both earth-shattering importance and banal disappointment.  It is only in the last third of this book, when Reynolds introduces thing like the accidentally created evolutionary zone where robots fight endlessly in a simulacra of Darwinism, and begins to explore how strange the universe outside of earth can be, that we really get to see the sort of big-ideas Reynolds is famous for.

Compared to all of his other works, Blue Remembered Earth is a different sort: slow, character-driven, interested in the human impact of the events he explains.  That he doesn’t always succeed is more than made up for by the fact that he is, at least, trying.  At the end of the book I was not disappointed, or frustrated, or angry; rather, I was a little wistful that I would have to wait another few years to see what happens next in the saga of the Akinyas. It’s not so bad, I suppose; in the meantime I have other books, and I can always reread BRE, and see if I missed anything.

For a book, especially one in a trilogy, I’m pretty sure that all that matters.