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I keep mentioning Alastair Reynolds and his Revelation Space universe whenever I read and review a science fiction book or series. As you can probably see, I’m quite fond of his work, and for some reason, I just have never got around to publishing a review, though it’s been sitting in my drafts since 11th March, 2008. I tossed the old review, and started anew, since I’ve read a few more things since writing the review.

Let’s get this out of the way so you know my biases: Alastair Reynolds is, to date, my favourite author of science fiction and his Revelation Space universe is a compelling story, with characters that are both familiar and alien all at once.

In chronological order, the books are Chasm City, Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap; sprinkled throughout are the stories contained in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North. I have not yet read The Prefect; I’m waiting for the Ace paperback version so that the set matches up. The premise of Reynolds’ Lovecraftian science fiction horror is a case of Menschendämmerung – the twilight of man. Set mainly in the next thousand years, the universe is one where humans have split into many factions, the star-faring Ultras, the planet-hugging Demarchists, and the hive-minded Conjoiners, chief amongst them. The main arc of the Revelation Space universe relates the story of the human discovery of Inhibitors – a race of machines that silently seek out and destroy intelligent life. There are a few unique things about the Revelation Space Universe that are worth noting, however.

The first thing you need to know about the books is that Reynolds is an actual astrophysicist. As such, you will get into the nitty gritty of how the ships work, how some of the weapons function, and yes, even gravity will work as advertised. Mostly. So if you don’t have some idea of – or interest in reading about – the Casimir effect, or Brane theory, then you’ll likely find it slow going. And you must have some idea of the Fermi paradox to understand why Reynolds writes in the first place. He’s a scientist and is writing fiction to be able to explore some of the things he can’t publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

No matter. Reynolds writes in an extraordinarily straightforward manner. Sentences are precisely as long as they need to be to get the point across. You need not suffer Virginia Woolf-like run-ons, nor will you be left with incomplete thoughts, like many other authors (*cough*Vinge*cough*). It’s also a very culturally neutral story, as one would hope a sci-fi novel that talks about a world very fundamentally different from today. The nice thing about this aspect of the story is that having grown up in a non-Western culture and household, I don’t find myself running to look up some obscure biblical reference, or extinct gods or such. Excellent. I quite like it. Simmons, for example, requires an intimate familiarity with various Western pantheons, which is one of the reasons I’ve resisted reading Illium and Olympos, for fear of needing to stop and refer to Wikipedia constantly.

Second, because Reynolds is an actual astrophysicist, the universe obeys the same laws as our own: no causality violations, entropy still increases, and time doesn’t suddenly speed up and slow down. As an effect of this, Reynolds’ universe is slower than light. Plus side: humans routinely live a thousand years, both because of the effects of time dilation, and the development of hibernation. In many ways, the period it is set in is quite dystopian, with humans on their way out as a species. Unlike many such dystopian universes, it is also quite optimistic about humans and human chance for survival.

This all makes for a very compelling and very realistic story. Economic booms and economic busts exist and force distinct choices for the characters. Mucking about at slower than light speed means huge risks for traders – the technology a trader has spent a fortune bringing to the isolated worlds inhabited by humans may be obsolete before the trader gets there (similar to Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, but far more realistic in its implications). And space is big. Really big. It’s not like Star Trek or Star Wars big, where it takes a while, but you can still get there quickly enough if Scotty or Chewbacca tweaks the engines a little; it’s big the same way the distance from earth to the moon hasn’t been covered more than a dozen times by humans, or the way the Voyager probes have spent two decades in transit to the heliosheath.

I don’t really know what else I can say about the story without giving away large chunks of its plots. Suffice to say, humans make contact with this race of machines committed to eradicating intelligent life – and the humans are not entirely successful in their efforts to contain it. There’s also a dozen dead or hidden civilizations, and many mysteries that cannot be explained – and that Reynolds makes no attempt to explain, indeed. Unlike Simmons, Reynolds doesn’t make an attempt to tie up all loose ends – you’re left to figure out the various (non-human) races and their relationships to each other and the artifacts that humans encounter through space. If you search carefully through the web, you’ll find both on-going debates, and remainders of such debates, about the nature of various artifacts and their relationship to the story.

Ultimately, it’s that kind of story: Reynolds has created a universe, told the story of several important characters and their reactions to a major event in human history, and tossed it out for others to finish, either in their heads, or through fan fiction. It is almost certainly the most exhilarating new series I have read. I find myself both craving more and filling in the story in bits and pieces nearly nine months after I finished reading as insights into characters and events occur.

All I can say is this: read it. It’s amazing.

“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”

-Quellcrist Falconer

I’ve been putting off reading Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy for a while. Primarily, I had been hoping that he may have written more of a character who I’ve come to, if not like, then at least enjoy reading about; that seems to now have been ruled out. Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies are three very different tales centered around the exploits of one of the more entertaining anti-heroes. The first is a straight noir whodunnit that introduces readers to some of the weirder technologies and some of the background of the universe in which Kovacs lives and thrives. The second establishes some more of the backstory of the universe, and introduces people to Kovacs’ calling in life, via a grail quest. The last is a story of romance and obsession, and reveals a sentimental side to Kovacs.

Altered Carbon introduces Kovacs’ universe: following the signposts established by a long extinct Martian civilization, humans have colonized a few extraterrestrial worlds. Travel is either by slow, sub-luminal colony ships, or instantaneously via transmission. The catch is that you can’t transmit the entire human like a Star Trek transporter device; instead, humans are split in two: the physical body (“sleeves” in, Kovacs’ parlance) is left behind while the memories and, for a lack of a better word, soul, housed in “stacks”, are transmitted and downloaded into a new body. Thus even if the body is damaged, or destroyed, as long as the stacks are recoverable – and they usually are, as long as deliberately destructive attempts are not made – humans can be transferred into a new body. Given that there are no restrictions on how transfers are made (males into females and vice versa, adults into children bodies, etc.), it leads to interesting scenarios for self-identity. For example, during one conflict, a notorious mobster transfers into a child’s body, since adults are still reluctant to shoot children. On the physical side of things, bodies can be cloned, grown with specific enhancements, with or without certain diseases or resistance to radiation, and such.

In Altered Carbon, Kovacs, recently discharged from an elite corps of the military, finds himself on Earth, trying to solve what appears to be an apparent suicide. Broken Angels, several decades later, takes Kovacs to a world ripped apart by civil war, as a military adviser to one of the groups at war. This book was perhaps my favourite of the series, with Kovacs disappearing from the front line to find and investigate a Martian ship. Morgan also gives hints as to what happened to the Martian civilization and why they may have disappeared. The final novel, Woken Furies, takes Kovacs back to his native Harlan’s World. Seeking revenge for an unrequited love killed by a religious order, Kovacs is busy eradicating the leadership of the order when he meets a long dead rebellion leader and philosopher, Quellcrist Falconer (easily one of the most interesting fictional philosophers in recent memory).

All in all, while I liked each of the stories independently, I found that they aren’t tied together much, which could have really provided a tighter universe; indeed, the second story seemed to be establishing a major story arc that simply disappears from the third. And aside from a few throwaway references by Kovacs about his work before, there’s basically nothing other than the single character tying the stories together. I suppose in some ways, this is akin to the pre-Casino Royale James Bond films, where Bond would deal with a crisis, and then it would pay no role in the successor films. Thus Kovacs’ actions have no consequence, no reward, and no impact (I suppose, if I were being nihilistic, then this is a perfectly reasonably position to take; on the other hand, if this story is being told, then it must be worth telling in a cohesive fashion). The second book in particular seemed to almost throw itself away; the conclusion hinted strongly at Kovacs’ group of friends working together in the future – of which, none show up in the third novel.  The net result is a frustratingly disconnected tale.

If you can live with three disjointed tales in the vein of the original Foundation, then you are likely to enjoy Morgan’s fluent writing and acerbic wit. If you were annoyed by novella fashion that Asimov used in that book, or like me, love complete universes, then you’re likely to be frustrated. Either way though, Morgan is one of the more compelling sci-fi authors of modern times, and a treat to read – if you can live with his story-telling style.

I am hard pressed to think of a sci-fi story that has had as much of an impact on me as Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. The tetralogy, consisting of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, is a far-future story that tells a tale across 300 years. I was given the first book as a Christmas gift in 2006, and since then, I have made an effort to read at least a book a week that is not related to my work. After 21 months, I decided I had to read it again, given that I’ve read nearly a hundred books in the interreggum.

The first book opens in the last week of existence of a 200+ year-old human empire, the Hegemony of Man, that spans the length and breadth of the Orion Arm of our home galaxy in 2852. Earth is dead – destroyed by a miscalculation during the handling of a black hole (a fact that seems more apropos today than it did when I first read the book). 130 billion humans live on 200 “WebWorlds” stitched together by “farcaster” – an instantaneous teleportation device; tens of billions more live on dozens of world not connected to the Web and travel via Hawking Drive – a superluminal, but not instantaneous, travel method. In addition, countless billions of artificial intelligences live as a separate race – the TechnoCore. Finally, there are the Ousters – a group of humans who have branched off from “mainline” humans living on the WebWorlds, and choose to adapt themselves to space, rather than adapt space to themselves.

Hyperion focuses on the lives of seven pilgrims chosen by the Hegemony to avert a war between the Hegemony and Ousters at Hyperion, a frontline world that is home to some of the greatest mysteries in the galaxy. Amongst the mysteries are the Time Tombs – artifacts from a distant future travelling backwards through time – and the Shrike, a grim reaper. Two priests, a soldier, a poet, a scholar, a detective and a diplomat begin the journey; six of them relate their back stories that brought them there. I’m not going to tell you the stories themselves, but suffice to say, that Simmons’ breadth of vision is pretty amazing: all but one of the stories play crucial roles to understanding what happens in the later books. As you can guess by the title of the next book, the attempt is ultimately futile, and the Hegemony falls – though not quite the way I had predicted when I started reading the book.

The two Endymion books tell the story of Aenea, a new messiah (with a palindromic name, no less!). Told in first person by her companion and love, Raul, the story follows them and their companions through dozens of the old WebWorlds and the Ousters’ collectives. Fleeing a resurgent Catholic church, which portrays Aenea as a false prophet and heretic, they meet alien species living unobtrusively amongst humans, Ousters that can survive in the vacuum of space, and humans so different from the norm as to be aliens. As a foreigner in America, a country which is both big enough and isolationist enough that one can go months without hearing of a major event abroad, reading the Endymion stories shortly after the Hyperion stories was like travelling abroad: an abrupt discovery of the rest of the world and its happenings. Given the fate of most messiahs – self-proclaimed and otherwise – you might make a reasonable guess as to what happens to Aenea, though methinks his editor forced him to make a few changes and end on a happier note.

Simmons’ also brings the hundreds of other threads of the nearly 2,200-page epic to a satisfying close, though he leaves open just enough mysteries to get you to think. He’s also created a huge and well-defined universe that he could return to and he does briefly in his short story Orphans of the Helix (which takes place another 400 years into the future, in the first half of the 37th century). In his opening to that short story, he suggests that he is bored with the universe and that while he may visit, he does not intend to return, which is something of a tragedy. I find myself occasionally wondering what becomes of the characters and their stories; Simmons has succeeded in making the characters and their lives real enough that you think of them as fond friends, and not as figments of a literary imagination. I suppose that writing up to the point a messiah dies is interesting; no one really has explored the aftermath, though Simmons makes a very brief stab at it. The most amazing thing about this epic, though, is the remarkable fluidity it shows. At over a half-million words, one would assume that the story might fall apart, through inconsistency (like Asimov’s Foundation series), through long-winded and irrelevant fixations (like anything by Ayn Rand), through general malaise (too many novels come to mind). It does not. It keeps one interested all the way to the end, and it tells a might good tale, too! It’s not a good first sci-fi novel, but if you’ve read anything else, and been disappointed at the triteness of the story, or the found yourself bewildered by the terminology, or are in the market for another darn good yarn, this is it.

I’ve recently tried out a newer Nokia device, the N78. Other than the slightly weird button design, the phone is a huge step forward over the disaster that was the N80. Couple the new OS to a decent amount of free RAM, a significantly better software ecosystem (mostly because Nokia got itself involved again) and you end up with a device that is finally a decent mobile computer and not just a souped-up phone.

So I was watching with interest as the N97 was announced earlier today. Henri Bergius and Rob Scoble both think the device is a huge step forward for truly two-way interactive devices. It sort of finally fulfills the basic hardware needs for someone to actually produce, edit and publish content on the go. That said, this device will live and die because of an entirely different aspect of being: software.

Right now, on my iPhone, I have access to approximately 10,000 applications. While 9,000 of these are calculators, flashlights, conversion tables and the like, the 10% that remain are truly innovative and interesting applications that make use of the iPhone’s modest hardware with aplomb, despite Apple’s software restrictions. From small fun games like Tris or Fuzzle, to VNC and RDP clients, to spreadsheets and text editors, to social networking and media applications, I can find just about any type of application that I want in the App Store. Download! on the newer S60 phones is designed to provide a similar experience – however, in the N80 there were about a half-dozen bizarrely sorted links and in the N78 there are about a dozen links. If I want to find themes or software, I have to use Google. If I want to use some of these applications, chances are I have to pay – and not insubstantial amounts. Nokia’s advertising suggests there are thousands of applications for S60; I suspect the amount is closer to the hundreds – and each is significantly more expensive than its counterpart on the iPhone (for example: Bejeweled 2 on the iPhone: $2.99; Bejeweled 2 on S60: $9.99). Long story short, both the time and money investment is greater to get similar functionality… so other than the (potential of the) hardware, why would I go with the Nokia?

The second software problem is internal to Nokia: its spastic, incoherent OS strategy. If you have never come across the issue of Nokia product codes before, you are a lucky, lucky person. Essentially, these are specific codes that define a phone’s identity. So I don’t have just a Nokia N80, I had a “North American 1″ Nokia N80, which despite being identical in hardware to the European N80, requires a different OS build. Thus Nokia often provides updates for one product code of the phone (say, the “Euro 1″ N80) and leaves the other variants (“Euro 2″, “Euro 3″, “Asia 7″) without updates. While I understand that some part of this comes from carrier customization requirements, it suggests that Nokia essentially has to rebuild its OS from scratch, rather than provide hooks for carriers to customize their offerings. It also makes the entire process unnecessarily complex and confusing for the end user: “why does my friend have the latest OS, but I have an older one?” My hope is that with the new S60 5th Edition, they take the opportunity to provide a cleaner, more unified, upgrade path for all devices off a common software base. They are almost certainly never going to get another opportunity to do this without another platform break, and a third platform break in ten or 15 years is going to scare away any remaining developers.

And finally, they need to release the device in a hurry. Unlike the N80 or the N95, Nokia doesn’t have a year to release the device – it needs to be out in three, maybe four months, top. Unlike when those phones were announced, there are many more players in the mobile space, and Nokia may find itself losing ground not just to Apple, or Google, or any of the other established players, but also to upstarts like Garmin and OpenMoko.

(PS – Having a US distribution strategy may also help!!)