Video: The Trouble with Transporters

This is a great video by CGP Grey about transporters: great form of transportation or suicide box?

Book Review: The World Inside by Robert Silverberg

Pros: fascinating world, fascinating characters

Cons: if you’re prudish you won’t like this book

Centuries in the future the human population has increased dramatically.  Most humans live in 1000 story towers separated into cities with their own schools, hospitals, etc.  Fed by communes outside the towers that urban dwellers will never see as they live their lives fully contained within their buildings.

This book starts with the premise that humans have moved into towers, foregoing privacy for a sexually liberal society and then shows what life is like for a handful of those inhabitants.  It’s a fascinating look at a certain kind of utopian society - and how unhappy many of its inhabitants are under their veneer of acceptance.

The stories vary in terms of interest, though each shows a different aspect of life.  The first involves a lot of exposition as a urbmon dweller explains the tower lifestyle to a visiter from Venus, where the lifestyle is quite different.  Another story shows a young woman’s terror over the prospect of being forced to move to a new tower.  Most of the stories are from the point of view of the higher middle class, though there are glimpses of how the lower, physical workers, and higher, government workers live.

Like many utopian/dystopian books there’s a huge emphasis on population and sex in this book.  There’s a brief contrast in one of the stories between how the people in the towers encourage having children while those of the communes must keep their populations in check.  While the free sexual mores are meant to reduce conflict, jealousies still arise, though not the way you might expect.  There’s a LOT of sex going on in this book.  It’s not graphic and is there to make several points, but consider yourself warned.

I’d expected the book to end with the departure of the Venusian visitor so I was a little surprised when a different character got a second story.  The story did wrap things up well though, touching - however briefly - on the other viewpoint characters.

This is a pretty interesting book.  There’s no plot but the world and characters are quite interesting and will keep you turning pages.  I did find one story, about a musician, a little boring, but the others were quite fascinating.  I’d put it with Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day in terms of dystopian worlds that might not be so bad to live in.

Shout-Out: Japan Sinks - Sakyo Komatsu

After dropping anchor for the night near a small island to the south of Japan, a crew of fishermen awaken to find that the island has vanished without a trace. An investigating scientist theorizes that the tiny island has succumbed to the same force that divided the Japanese archipelago from the mainland ― and that the disastrous shifting of a fault in the Japan Trench has placed the entire country in danger of being swallowed by the sea.

Based on rigorous scientific speculation, Japan Sinks recounts a completely credible series of geological events. The story unfolds from multiple points of view, offering fascinating perspectives on the catastrophe's political, social, and psychological effects. Winner of the Mystery Writers of Japan Award and the Seiun Award, this prescient 1973 science-fiction novel foreshadowed the consequences of the 1995 Osaka-Kobe earthquake and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Video: Hell's Club

This is a clever mash-up of club scenes from a host of movies by ANTONIO MARIA DA SILVA AMDSFILMS.

There is a place where all fictional characters meet. . Outside of time, Outside of all logic, This place is known as HELL'S CLUB, But this club is not safe.

If you like this, there's a part 2 that has some aliens...

Shout-Out: Chosen Soldiers by R. H. Scott

After the missiles tore up the Earth, societies crumbled, leaving scattered patches of humanity struggling to survive. Slowly, a group came together, helping each other regrow a world worth living in.

And then the Others attacked.

Realizing the need to truly protect themselves, they formed the Academy: a place where young people could be built into an elite military force. The training is intense…and so are the consequences for failure.

Sloan Radcliffe is not a failure. In fact, she’s the best of the best—the girls’ Senior Champion—and the only one who can match her is matched to her: her betrothed, Jared Dawson. They are the perfect couple: exemplary fighters, pure leaders, and exceptional role models. But as their time at the Academy draws to a close, Sloan is starting to see signs that maybe their life is built upon secrets…and that secrets are never a strong foundation.

With the battlefront looming and whispers growing louder, Sloan is caught up not only between her loyalties to her people, but also to the man she loves.

Unsung Stories Launches Unsung Signals

Unsung Stories is a British genre fiction imprint of Red Squirrel Publishing that looks for:

...the fuzzy bits between genres: hard, soft, gooey and fuzzy sci-fi, high, low, top, middle and bottom fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, steampunk, cyberpunk, space opera, weird, dark, comedy, satire and anything else that falls somewhere between any or all of those.

Launched in January, Unsung Signals is a digital only line that publishes mid-length fiction, stories that are too long for magazines but too short to be published as books.

And like everything else we do, we are accepting un-agented submissions. So if you have work between 5-30,000 words long – a novella, a collection of stories, something great that's just that bit too long for everywhere else – let us know. You can submit via our form.

Their first title is Winter, a novella by Dan Grace where:

...a violent future of the failed Union meets the mythic and pagan past. As man reaps the harvest of war, utopian hopes vie with apocalyptic fears. Winter sets in.

Not a Review: Infoquake by David Louis Edelman

Not a Review looks at books I got a good way through before giving up on them. I’ll explain why I read so much and why I didn’t finish.  These are - by their nature - going to be predominately negative reviews.  They’ll also contain some amount of spoilers (though I’ll try not to give anything major away without a warning).

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Pros: some interesting characters, fascinating world

Cons: Natch’s lack of ethics made him unlikeable, lots of set-up for little payback, mystery kept too long   

Read: 392 of 484 pages + skimmed to end

Natch, head of his own fiefcorp, wants to make the number one spot on Primo with their newest bio/logic system NiteFocus 48.

Infoquake sets up the Jump 225 trilogy by introducing the major players and futuristic world. Split into several sections, the first introduces Jara, a data analyst who works for the Natch fiefcorp. The second section goes through Natch’s life, explaining how he got to be where he is now. The third section, around 300 pages in, has Natch agree to take on a mysterious project. Only in the fourth section does he - and by extension the reader - finally learn what this project is, and what the trilogy is all about.

I really enjoyed the first section of the book.  Jara is an interesting character, stuck in a job she’s grown to hate, but who is easily manipulated by her unethical boss into doing things she doesn’t agree with.  She’s counting the days until her contract expires.  You’re thrown into the book with little explanation of the terms used, which was a bit confusing, but was overall a great way of immersing me in the new world. 

The second section was interesting, though I didn’t like Natch and as time went on I actively started to hate him.  This section had a lot of world building, explaining a lot of terms and ideas, giving me a better grounding in how things work in this future.

The third section lost me.  I felt I had a handle on what was going on and how things worked, but this section seemed to bring in a whole new series of factors - more unexplored history, more unexplained terms.  I understand that Natch would be drawn to the mystery - and be willing to take it up with limited information, but I was losing interest in the story.  I also find it hard to root for a character when I don’t really want to see them succeed.  Rather than draw my interest, the mystery made me realize how little I cared for these people and this world.  I spent a week avoiding the book, reading a page or two and finding some other task to do.

Section four is where I finally gave up.  The reveal was such a let down.  Despite all the groundwork laid by the earlier sections I had no idea what the technology was supposed to do.  Learning that the characters didn’t either didn’t make me feel any better.  I wanted to know what happened so I skimmed the rest of the book.  The ending… was even more of a let down as it basically stops.  There’s no real climax - though maybe the presentation of the technology was meant to be the climax and I didn’t get the proper feel of that because I only skimmed the lead up to it.

I also realized, after skimming the ending, that there’s a comprehensive appendix at the back that explains terminology and history.  Wish I’d realized that earlier - though the book does a decent job of giving you necessary information eventually, I’m sure the information contained in the appendix would have clarified things for me.

Now, the presentation did - finally - explain what this new technology does, and it is quite fascinating.  So maybe the next book, which I assume picks up immediately where this one ends, will be fascinating too.  However, while the politics and world are pretty interesting, the people just aren’t compelling enough for me to push through and read more.