Book Notes

 I wrote this some time last year or the year before. I'm not sure when this is from, exactly. I am posting without further comment.

Island in the Sea of Time – SM Stirling

This is a series that I have known about for some time and I read the opening novel of the sister series about a year and a half ago. Without being too glib about it, I will just say that these books aren't for me. They straddle the line between SF and fantasy and I think that they end up being a bit on the fantasy side of things for my tastes.

The basic story is that the island of Nantucket is inexplicably transported 3000 years into the past and the islanders have to figure out how to survive. I like the concept. Stirling really gets into details on various aspects and has a very broad view of the world he wants to remake. I don't fault his vision or the writing. I just don't particularly care for the kind of tactical writing that he gets into. There are a lot of descriptions of fight scenes and war tactics that don't do it for me. For the right person, though, I can see this being a fantastic series.

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

I'm not sure I get George Saunders anymore. I wonder if I ever did.

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

I first read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas when I was in graduate school. That is a nesting novel that interlaces several different characters and settings into a sort of cosmic return/cycle/metempsychosis that is pretty entertaining but unravels after one particular narratological mis-step that I won't get into here.

The Bone Clocks revisits some of the themes and narrative techniques featured in Cloud Atlas. Characters called “atemporals” live outside of time, fight an unseen war, and influence mortal humans around the world. Pretty good stuff. The opening sections of the book serve as character studies for the principal characters that will influence the latter half of the novel and the way that Mitchell interlaces their stories is confusing at first but comes together as the novel progresses.

While I found myself getting a little lost in the particulars of the individual characters I did enjoy the leaps in time that occur throughout the novel. Mitchell predicts a future Ireland in the “Endarkenment” after some cataclysmic event forces much of humanity back into a mostly pre-technology existence. I ended up liking the near-future predictions a bit more than some of the other aspects that ran a little more fantastic. This ends up being a better novel than Cloud Atlas and a better representation of some of the same ideas.

Riot Baby – Tochi Onyebuchi

This is a fantastic novel that blends near-future carceral dystopian elements with just enough fantasy to keep it going. The meditations on the impacts of violence on physical and psychological beings are moving and inspiring.

Read it.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising – Daniel H. Wilson

This is an odd little book that came to my attention recently. Over the last couple of years I have been trying to read more pop science books. This book came up on a list and so I requested it through the county library. This book is actually a guide to surviving a robot uprising. It includes some meditations on current technologies (well, current as of its publication in 2005) and how to evade, defeat these things. It is billed as a humor book as well, and it has its moments. I burned through the book pretty quickly because much of it is laid out in very small sections. Interesting book but I have the feeling that it will soon be completely obsolete if it is not already due to the rise of smart phones and all of that attendant technology. It would be cool to see an update of this written with more contemporary tech in mind.