The Core Dump

Thirteen is a splendid near-future thriller with shades of noir and cyberpunk. Richard K. Morgan has created a complex and unfortunately believable dystopia in which humans are being genetically engineered to function better in certain roles, such as the title’s variant thirteen, engineered to be better soldiers.

The plot is well constructed and fast, with plenty of mayhem amid the question of what makes somebody more or less human, and Morgan’s world creation is first-rate.

Thirteen is about as good as it gets. Highly recommended.

Note that this is a very graphical novel both when it comes to violence and sex.

Woken Furies is the third installment in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs saga, and according to Richard Morgan it will be last. If this is so, the series goes out with a bang, bringing together a lot of the world building hints Morgan has strewn around in the first two novels, Altered Carbon, and Broken Angels.

A brilliant mesh of cyberpunk and noir, this is one of the best novels I’ve read this year—smart, ferocious, and with a tight plot, it is one intense ride.

While Woken Furies can be read as a stand-alone, it is much more fulfilling if you’ve read the previous two installments.

Get on board the Kovacs train. You won’t be disappointed.

Read more Core Dump Richard Morgan reviews.

Seeing images from other planets never gets old. Huge congrats to the Phoenix Mars Mission! Massive respek.

The Dragon Never Sleeps is prime Glen Cook—a huge, literally galaxy-spanning plot, gritty realism, and hastily sketched but interesting characters.

As with his Dread Empire series, Cook throws the reader right into the mess of things without much explanation, leaving it up to you to figure out what’s really going on, and introduces an army of characters and motivations without ado. The Dragon Never Sleeps is one of those novels you absolutely can not skim; it requires attention if it’s going to make any kind of sense.

It’s always great to see an author working in the genre resist the urge to stretch things out—in the hands of pretty much any other author, The Dragon Never Sleeps would have been at minimum three 800-page bricks, but Cook keeps it under 300 dense but rewarding pages.

Granted, Cook is a bit of an acquired taste, and anybody new to him should start out with the brilliant Black Company series, but for the fan this novel delivers.

Recommended.

Glasshouse takes place in the post-singularity far future where people have the ability to change their bodies any way they like, back themselves up at will, and all the other post-singularity goodies.

The novel takes a while to get going, and at first it’s a bit hard to figure out what kind of drama Charles Stross can mine from an environment where, by definition, nothing bad can really happen.

Once the characters find themselves in the “Glasshouse” of the title, though, the action and the suspense become fast and furious, and Glasshouse settles in to become a creepy meditation on the psychology of memory and gender roles.

Once you have the ability to edit your memories, can you really trust yourself?

The ending feels a little bit abrupt and neat, but apart from that, Glasshouse features strong and interesting characters, impressive world-building, and tense action sequences.

Highly recommended.

The Scar is China Miéville’s follow-up to Perdido Street Station, which builds on the successes of the first novel while avoiding the problems it displayed, making for a strong and compelling sophomore effort.

The world building remains impressive and obsessively detailed, and The Scar introduces much stronger and more interesting characters together with a plot that while over-the-top builds in a gratifying way.

That being said, The Scar does start off slow and takes a while to gather steam (rimshot!).

Probably the most troubling aspect of Miéville’s work is that it makes you ponder the unthinkable: If I like this, does that make me a liker of steampunk?

Perdido Street Station

Perdido Street Station is one wild ride. Part sci-fi, part Victorian-style steam punk, and part horror, it’s a hard novel to characterize. What’s clear, though, is that China Miéville is blessed with an imagination that works overtime and solid writing skills.

Taking place in New Crobuzon, a nightmarish city populated by humans and an endless amount of strange aliens that all try to scratch out a living in a pitiless and corrupt environment, the novel follows a disgraced scientist as he goes through a series of horrific events.

The strengths of the novel are a solid sense of place and structure as well as a plethora of characters in various stages of derangement. Miéville creates vivid, cinematographic scenes that stay with you—sometimes whether you want them to or not.

But it’s far from a perfect work. The plotting is a bit weak, especially once the novel settles on its monster-hunt theme, and Miéville’s baroque writing style which sometimes adds great atmospehere to the novel also sometimes goes overboard and obscures rather than enhances the story.

Perdido Street Station is interesting and highly imaginative.

The best comparison might be if Neil Gaiman had been locked in a room with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral set on endless repeat as he worked.

Released in 1986, Walter Jon Williams’s Hardwired is one of the classics of proto-cyberpunk—a gritty and raucous machine set in a version of the standard 80s future dystopia of hackers and outlaws. With high energy, a fairly character-driven plot, and cool tech, it’s very much worth a revisit.

Judas Unchained is Peter F. Hamilton’s continuation of the story begun in Pandora’s Star and it is utterly brilliant. Like Pandora’s Star (my review here), Judas Unchained is huge, sprawling, and realized with an uncanny eye for detail.

It is also faster-paced than Pandora’s Star, which had to spend a lot of time and energy in setting up the universe and the characters.

Not only is Hamilton a first-class universe-builder, but his plotting is also incredibly strong, and he creates sharply-drawn characters, both human and alien.

This is the gold standard for science fiction. If you enjoy the genre at all, you owe it to yourself to read these novels.

The one problem, and it’s not one that can be blamed on Hamilton, is that the cover for Judas Unchained doesn’t emphasize enough that this is the second volume in a novel, and it barrels straight into the action, leaving a reader who hasn’t read Pandora’s Star completely adrift. Caveat SF nerd.

Related Core Dump reviews:

Pandora’s Star

Valentine’s Rising is the fourth book in E. E. Knight’s Vampire Earth series, and continues the story of David Valentine’s struggle against the Kurians.

The writing is tighter in this installment of the series, and Knight is very successful in portraying the horrors of living under the Kurians, putting in some very visceral scenes. This is another page-turner.

On the downside, the novel is a bit of a rut, with a lot of battles and action happening, but not much to drive the story arch forward.

If you’re a fan of the series, it’s not bad, but Valentine’s Rising doesn’t make you want to run out and get the next installment.

Related Core Dump reviews:

Way of the Wolf
Choice of the Cat
Tale of the Thunderbolt