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The hallmark of good science fiction is that it draws the reader into an alien world where people very much like the reader face fantastic dilemmas in an alien setting that the reader can still empathize with. Readers of The Colors of Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley will find this to be true in spades and even more so. From the outset, the novel feels a great deal like a coming of age story for the main character, young Bart Steele, recent graduate from the Space Academy. He has his entire life ahead of him…

Of course, few coming of age stories go in the direction the protagonist thinks their life is going to go.

When Bart expects to meet his father at the spaceport, he is instead thrust into a complex conspiracy involving humanity’s place in the stars. Instead of his father, he meets one of his father’s friends (pretending to be his father) who changes its appearance, throws him onto a spaceship, and catapults young Bart into the adventure of his life.

In this future setting humanity has reached the stars with the help of the Lhari—a humanoid alien race who discovered the secret to faster-than-light travel. They also hold a monopoly on it. Instead of giving the secret of FTL to humanity, they keep it to themselves, telling humans that only Lhari can survive the jump to FTL, called “warp”, and they maintain the secret by putting humans on the ships into cold sleep before the event to keep them from dying.

Bart’s father is part of a collective human conspiracy to get the technology from the Lhari, prove that humans can survive warp, and that they deserve the technology that the Lhari have been monopolizing all the years they’ve known humanity.

As the cover might suggest color plays a very big part in the story. The Lhari, unlike humans, cannot see in color, only luminosity—in a way they only see black and white. As a result, much of the prose of the story is written with colors front-and-center with vivid descriptions of settings, sunsets, and especially stars. More than one case as a reader I was graced with a beautiful description of stars as jewels or colors such as “topaz” for the sun, the sapphire blue of Rigel.

Bradley’s prose is fluid and beautiful and fitting to the situations it’s described in—color takes a row front-and-center of much of the story, and it fits nicely into the plot.

In fact, the secret of FTL is apparently a yet-unseen color called the eighth color. Bart’s father’s shipping company is named “Eight Colors.”

Bart Steele comes across as a young kid thrust into an unexpected conspiracy when he’s swept up into the plot. He’s given very little information about his father (and why the Lhari are seeking him) but just that it may have something to do with FTL. During the story he’s thrust into a fish-out-of-water situation where he undergoes cosmetic surgery to look like one of the Lhari so that he can work aboard one of their ships as a spy. Through this we learn a great deal of Lhari culture and not just humans see them (as aliens) but how they see humans—and that human compassion does cross cultural and racial boundaries.

As a person, Bart must reconsider how he was raised and how he looked at the Lhari all his life—especially the xenophobic attitudes of his own culture and people about them. He makes friends on board the ship and becomes extremely introspective about the relationship between humanity and the Lhari. They’ve been shuttling humanity between the stars for years and keeping the FTL technology from them, this alone has raised a great deal of animosity between the races, and a certain amount of strange resentment. They even brainwash-via-hypnosis those humans who do work directly for them.

This book is accessible to both adults and juveniles, Bart himself feels like an older teenager just out of high-school (Space Academy) and the prose plays on personal biases, cultural awareness, friendship, honor, and introspection. The science fiction elements are strong in that space-travel and how humanity might interact with another race slot nicely into the contemplative roles of speculative fiction.

The colorful prose (and I mean that literally) brings Bart Steele and his world into a vivid focus with him as a believable central character growing up suddenly into a world he thought he knew. It’s a short read, potentially the type of book you’d carry onto an airplane or fall asleep with at night; but it has a lasting elemental plot-line that left a smile on my face as I watched Bart successfully navigate the perils that his life thrust at him and his place in changing the fate of humanity.

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If you’ve ever encountered the concept of grey goo and “The Game of Life,” a computer model that uses something called cellular-automata along with simple rules and a grid system to generate interesting patterns you’ll understand the basis for Bloom. To explain, grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario where some sort of self-replicating technology goes out of control, eats everything and makes more of itself, and obliterates the entire Earth—or in the case of Wil McCarthy’s Bloom, much of the central solar system.

I read Bloom during a hospital stay and it made an excellent escape-novel with a strong computer science basis combined with all the necessary elements of genre science fiction. Although I must admit the characters are a little bit forgettable, some of the technology and perils represented within (and the after-Earth scenario presented) made me feel good about the book. However, if you’re looking for a page turner or something to keep you interested because the characters are excellent amazing personalities, you won’t enjoy this book very much.

In the timeline of the book, the year 2106 represents the outbreak of the terrible Bloom—a nanite technology with a nearly infinite von Neumann capability to devour nearby matter and replicate itself. The introduction of this virulent species of technology is so catastrophic that it devours not only Earth, but expands itself across the orbit of Mars and Venus—although it’s too hot very close to the sun so Mercury is mostly okay and the asteroid belt is largely untouched. The Mycosystem, a vast fuzzy area of bloom space filled with these machines, sustains itself off the heat of sunlight and continues to replicate and tinker with itself as humanity is forced into self-imposed exile and diaspora into the colder reaches of the solar system.

The threat of the bloom still looms on space colonies even in the asteroids and further out because humans take heat and energy with them. As a result, humans prepare what they call the Immunity, a careful training regiment and technologies designed to combat the Bloom by either stealing energy from a growing infection or burning it out—this brings in some of the more hilariously named “Witch’s Tits” a weapon that is basically a canister of extremely low temperature liquid gasses designed to freeze out a Bloom infection.

The plot of the story follows the protagonists as they climb on board a spacecraft designed specifically to penetrate the Mycosystem amid the inner planets and visit old Earth—which is largely dismantled by the bloom by now—to examine strange and unexpected visuals that they’ve been getting from optic and radio telescopes. The mission would be extremely perilous and terrifying. The name of the ship, The Louis Pasteur is named after the French chemist who brought us the germ-theory of disease, the first vaccines, and, of course, the pasteurization of milk to make it safe to consume.

The book continues to suggest that there’s an entire cult of humans who worship the bloom.

This becomes a problem because one of these cultists happens to be on board the spacecraft sent into the Mycosphere a fact that leads to a certain amount of intrigue and fear. In the Mycosphere, the Louis Pasteur is attacked by cultist ships also armed with a similar camouflage to protect them from being devoured.

What they find in the Bloom, however, appears to be a bit bizarre. Amid the devoured planets and the multitude of nanomachines that have obliterated the inner solar system, the machine seem to have taken on a life of their own and have become an entity unto themselves.

The book comes to its climax in the way that one might expect a fantasy-styled science fiction genre novel by presenting an (unexpected) twist that some of humanity swallowed by the bloom itself haven’t been destroyed, but still exist in the structure of the ever-expanding cloud as disintegrated entities. Although the novel doesn’t go any further to explain how or why or even deliver much of a reason to care that this happened.

I am unaware of a sequel to this book; but it would really deserve one where the nature of bloom-bound humanity vs. the diaspora into the outer solar system could be explored. It would be a spoiler to talk about this if it were the central meaning of the entire book, but really Bloom is a giant what-if scenario about the Game of Life and the grey goo scenario.

I would suggest reading it on a plane or if you’re in the hospital like I was, but it’s not going to be the next-profound science fiction novel to round out your library.

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The author Anne McAffrey is best known for her fantasy series The Dragonriders of Pern but she’s also a Hugo Award winning author of science fiction novels. Any enterprising science fiction enthusiast would find herself well-tread to pick up one of Ms. McAffrey’s novels and sit down on the couch with it. A good introduction to her work in this genre is The Ship Who Sang, originally published in 1969 and spawned an entire series called the “Brain & Brawn Ship series” in the 1990s.

The book is named after the first of a series of five short stories written by Anne McAffrey—they are all memorable but the primary short story sets the stage for the universe and the subject matter.

At the core, The Ship Who Sang is a story about the ultimate level of cyborg-transhumanism that’s reflected today in by many modern-day cyberpunk novelists. The main character, Helva, was born with a terrible birth defect that meant she couldn’t survive more than a few days after birth and thus she was sold by her parents to a corporation to be a “shell baby.” In this way, her growth was stunted and her body encased in a life-support capsule with a titanium shell allowing her to grow to adulthood—but not as a natural human.

As a result of this “shell people” are indentured to the corporation who paid for their medical bills, equipment, training, and such. As a result of their indentured nature, they’re compelled to work for the Central Worlds (the governing branch of the galactic human colonies in the books) in a majority of interesting and curious capacities. One of this is that of a “brainship” or a spacecraft whose central computer core is augmented with a “shell person” pilot who is integrated physically into the ship.

Brainships are partnered with a strong and intelligent mobile captain called the “brawn” who act as the extra-ship mobile person in their partnership.

The book explores not just the morality of indenturing people into specific service but the trials and travails of being a ship (or city, or hospital, etc.) with a human brain. Although the “brain” portion of brainships do have human bodies, the body is essentially vestigial by that point and the ship becomes their body. Only through intense training, medication, and surgery do they work and function as a fully cyborg entity.

This book, and the series it spawned, belongs in the category of transhumanism in exploring the question of what it is to be human. Although it could be argued that Helva is definitely human and maintains a great deal of her humanity, she lacks many of the fundamental properties that natural humans have—the fundamental of which being a human body. It also brought to mind moral questions about the treatment of the terrifically disabled.

Even with the Central Worlds and the science fiction elements intact, The Ship Who Sang is also a book about what happens in the universe. There are characters aplenty but the protagonist Helva has always shown brightest in my mind.

One emotional mention form the book has stayed with me for years. Helva’s first brawn died in a horrible radiation accident from which she herself was spared (due to being at the heart of a heavily shielded and buffered environment). She had to watch him die horribly in her airlock as she did everything in her power to protect him. The event is significant because brainships, for all their capability to fly through space, visit other worlds, and essentially do things that normal humans cannot; they’re still unable to do fine manipulation or rescue.

The title, The Ship Who Sang, is a reference to this event and that Helva (the ship) sang Taps at her brawn’s funeral.

To this day, I have not forgotten Helva, Brainship XH-834.

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The book Vast by Linda Nagata is the culmination of a trilogy that follows a small group of characters through the trials of outliving their own cultural heritage and how their technology has transcended their own humanity. As a science fiction novel it’s a bit of an outlier when it comes to commentary on the human condition because it maps less the cultural significance of technological influence and focuses on the individual struggles of the characters.

When approaching this book expect something a great deal more character driven than plot driven. Although the environment itself is the enemy of the characters in this book, they’re faced with numerous obstacles to overcome both personally and collectively.

Vast follows the remaining crew of the Null Boundary an ancient semi-living ship that has been sailing the reaches of interstellar space harboring four survivors of a terrible war that wasted their entire people. The first character is Lot, the sullen upstart and child of a profit who carries a nanovirus infection that spreads devotion to a religious cult. Urban, Lot’s boyhood friend whose sense of adventure drove him to head to the stars with Lot. Clemantine who experienced firsthand the destruction of her race and yearns for revenge. Finally there’s Nikko, who spends most of his time as the disembodied mind of the ship but actually has a body (should he choose to use it.)

They are seeking the Chenzeme, an alien race who are little known in of themselves except for their terrible warships that prowl the stars and ravage the civilized worlds. That’s basis of the plot; but really this is a book about the characters.

The Null Boundary itself is an interesting vessel and a technology that runs on something called “philosopher cells,” essentially a skin of thoughtful computers that discuss all decisions and determine based on consensus between the different cells. They’re living creatures and need nutriment and socialization—but they’re also vulnerable to the ravages of space. Without them the Null Boundary would be without senses. The character, Nikko spends most of his time talking to the philosopher cells attempting to learn from them and flying the ship.

The book presents the strange interpersonal relationships between people who are now more than people. With their bio- and nanotechnology they can upload their consciousness and sentience and keep it backed up. As a result, they’re capable of becoming part of the ship, cloning themselves off new bodies (with the same but separate minds) and even go out and explore without actually leaving the ship.

One of the more profound moments happens when Clemantine clones herself to go back home to see if their war-ravaged space has been recolonized by anyone. Her clone—a mind and shape that is actually her—leaves with great sorrow and the author points out that they cried for her as, “She would always be with them; they would never see her again.” While the original Clemantine stays on the ship, the clone Clemantine would be departing her friends from that point and never see them again.

As the end of a trilogy, it certainly helps to read the other books first—to come to grips not with the characters so much as the technologies and the word—but it stands alone well enough within the boundaries of its world building. Each of the characters is already well formed, with strong motivations and a great deal of emotional interplay as they reflect back on their past and what got them where they are now.

The title ends a little bit strangely, however, and leaves a lot of stones unturned. A great deal of the science fiction is written into the very relationships between the characters and into flashbacks into their past. In a powerful sort of way Vast is almost a retrospective on how science fiction looks at how technology affects individuals, empowers them in their journeys, but also sometimes changes them fundamentally at the human level.

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Anyone working their way through the cyberpunk genre should at least stop by Blade Runner (a movie) but many don’t know that the movie is really set from a book by Philip K. Dick and that book is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Although I am a huge proponent of knowing the masters and understanding a genre, Do Androids Dream doesn’t necessarily fall into cyberpunk canon as much as Blade Runner does for understanding the subject matter; although it is quite good science fiction and people will love it for its dystopian view of the future of Earth.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where any human able to escape from the nuclear wasteland left behind by the final world war has done so. The main plot follows the protagonist of the novel, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who preys on rogue androids. Those people left on Earth live in constant fear that they might be discovered to be androids themselves and to avoid this they show that they have empathy—as androids lack this particular human insight. As this is central to the theme of the novel, the book explores in strange detail what it is to be human.

Deckard is tasked with hunting down and “retiring” six escaped androids—they are the latest and most advanced model so they’re much more capable of passing as human. Obviously they have noticeable emotional frailties when pressed (due to their lack of empathy) but for the most part they pass as human.

While the book follows Deckard and another minor character who harbors the fugitives; the plot isn’t really the salient reason to read the novel over watching the movie Blade Runner. Instead, the book introduces a number of interesting what-is-it-to-be-human and fun cultural what-ifs about the ruined Earth. I’ll go over them here as they’re not spoilers to the content of the book, but these are a few gems that you’ll be treated to if you read for them.

The book introduces a culture of people who are so terrified of being outed as non-human (even if they are human themselves) that everyone keeps pets. After all, an android would not exhibit enough empathy to keep a living animal in good health; therefore humans with pets were actual humans.

There’s one problem with this behavior for the remaining humans, however: during World War Terminus radiation and fallout led to the extinction of almost every organism on the planet. Animals do not exist in any given abundance. As a result, sophisticated replicant animals exist that are entirely robotic but mimic their given animal to the last detail and people keep them and tend to them as if they’re real living animals. As a result fake vets began to crop up to repair ailing robot animals and retain the illusion that the animals were the real thing.

In the book it’s described that so few actual vets still exist that one woman who had an actual living pet called a robot vet to help her dying pet—and the technicians had to stand by and watch it die not knowing anything about any actual veterinary practice.

Humans left on the wasted-Earth are also connected in a fashion that seems like an extension of the sort of collective unconscious that the Internet brings for us today. From the comfort of home, people can gather by tuning into the same “channel” that allows participants to achieve the same brain state and thus experience the same thing (and each other experiencing it) at the same time. This technology led to an interesting cultural revolution called Mercerism, which people experienced as a collective-religious experience.

The channel that people joined played the same thing over and over. An old man trying to ascend a steep hill, covered in rocks and gravel, and as he walked he was accosted by unseen aggressors who threw things at him. Everyone who tuned into the “channel” experienced the same struggle and frustration as the man tried to climb the hill as well as the reaction of every other mind connected. It also meant that the entire collective shared in his triumph when he reached the top.

All of these elements combine to seek definitions about humanity and how androids (who appear to lack empathy) differ from the humans left on Earth (some of whom perhaps definitely don’t have empathy.) Deckard himself must struggle with the idea that he’s killing someone when he “retires” an android, although they’re not human, they certainly look and act human.

The book Do Androids Dream and the movie Blade Runner are fundamentally different and one is certainly not a substitute for the other. The questions asked in Do Androids Dream feel a great deal more profound than those answered in Blade Runner, but anyone who wants a good education in science fiction and the cyberpunk genre should probably set aside time to experience both.

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Steampunk is a much-overlooked literary form of science fiction that many science fiction fans find themselves drawn into. It’s often presented as a look at what-might-have-been through the eyes of technological progress if Tesla and Volt had instead been workers of mechanics and steam instead of electricity and magnetism. In his book, Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld presents an alternate history where not only do steam-driven gas-and-fuel machines dominate the skies but so also does the science of biology.

The Leviathan itself is an amazingly described creature of scientific progress, produced by the Darwinists through genetic manipulation (so-called life patterns) by mixing the patterns of a whale with that of other organisms to create a blimp-creature that fills itself with hydrogen like a dirigible. The opposite faction, the Clankers, use heavy machines and mechanisms where the Darwinists harness life itself to create new fantastic beasts—including the Leviathan.

The book takes place right before what would be World War I in this alternate history where the countries that would fall into the war in Europe lay upon factional lines between the Clankers and the Darwinists. Terrible portents light the path as a diplomat from the Austrian-Hungary Empire is slain in an assassination attempt and blamed on another country in the opposing bloc. Giant monarchies and world powers poised to attack each other… And thus the stage is set.

As a book, Leviathan is very plot-driven but the characters themselves are directly related to the world affairs. The first, an Austro-Hungarian prince (a Clanker power) by the name of Alek finds himself pulled into a world of fear and intrigue when his parents are assassinated. He is forced into flight underground as Germany—an erstwhile ally of his people—seek to kill him to prevent him from taking any sort of political power. England, a Darwinist power, watches the Clankers carefully, wondering what this might mean and if it will plunge the world into war. Alek is a young, arrogant boy who has lived his life in pampered luxury now thrust into a fight for his life.

Much of Alek’s narrative is about trying to stay inconspicuous, else the Clankers kill him or the Darwinists take him hostage as an enemy.

The other main character is Deryn—going by the name Dylan in order to join the air forces of her home country of England. As a Darwinist power, England harnesses the lifepatterns of beasts to create fantastic monsters and use them for its military might. The Levithan is one such monster-ship, but we also see that they have kraken (giant octopus) for taking out water ships as well as flying blimps. In fact, one type of floating-flying creature is named a Huxley, probably after one of Darwin’s friends when he was a young naturalist first discovering how life itself waves and evolves in forms.

Much of Deryn’s narrative all about trying to pretend to be a boy (lest her beloved British Air Service kick her out.)

Deryn finds herself aboard the Levithan quickly in the book and for the reader this is an amazing experience of description. Although Deryn well-knows much of what being part of the air service is, the reader still needs to be introduced to all the strange creatures that Darwinists create. The Leviathan isn’t just a giant blimped-out-whale, but an entire ecosystem of organisms that keep the ship running. Bees gather honey from the land and birds and bats in the hold eat insects and meat; all of them have hydrogen-producing bacteria that fill the gasbag of the blimp. The bats themselves are a type of weapon the blimp can use to defend itself; even the birds are trained to trail metal nets to slice through the wings of attacking Clanker aircraft.

The plot of the book follows events what precipitated World War I, but it does so through the eyes of youngster Alek and Deryn—on opposite sides of the upcoming war. Leviathan is a young adult book, so the two main characters are only about 15 years old and it shows to an extent. This shouldn’t be a turn off even for adult readers of this book and its subsequent series. There’s a lot to enjoy in the fluid prose of the book and the interesting world building that it presents.

How would World War I have changed if it were fought between biology-loving Darwinist powers and steampunk Clanker powers? In fact, the Clankers don’t just build engines and steam, they also make walkers—that is tanks with cannon that stand on two feet and stomp across the countryside. If that’s not enough to melt the science fiction lover’s heart—as if the Levithan didn’t already—then there may be no hope for this genre anyway.

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Some science fiction not only speaks to the effect of technology on people, but also the epic sweep of character and the overall character of humanity in the face of the unknown. In this way, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos series approaches a sort of soft science fiction poetry by propelling its character driven storyline into the annals of the must-read books from this genre.

First published in 1989, Hyperion won the Hugo science fiction award and it extensively employs a literary device known as framing. This device tells a story by having each of the character in-turn tell the stories of their own lives and uses that to bind together the plot of the book—imagine something like Scheherazade’s Thousand Tales or the more modern incarnation of Lost. Each of the characters in Hyperion may have entirely separate lives that have taken them to peculiar corners of the universe that works to construct the framework of the Hyperion worldbuilding.

The book Hyperion follows a small “chosen” group of seven characters who make the dangerous pilgrimage to a strange set of artifacts on the planet, Hyperion, in order to head off an oncoming galactic crisis. The name of the book comes from a John Keats poem Hyperion, which seems to really guide the poetic effect of the plot and the interaction of the stories of the pilgrims.

Each of the characters tells the story of their own lives and how they came to become part of the pilgrimage. The stories unveil a strange world haunted by an antagonist named the Shrike—a giant metal, robot-like monster that impales people on metal thorns causing extreme agony—and a universe colonized by humanity using FTL and wormholes to connect distant populations. The plight of humanity in Hyperion also revolves around the fact that Earth is gone—destroyed in something called the Big Mistake. (Essentially the generation of a black hole that swallows the planet, obliterating everything.)

Each of the pilgrims is memorable either due to their strange personalities or the obstacles presented in their stories. Amid them, there’s a priest who had a mission to the planet of Hyperion and discovered a strange parasite organism that eternally resurrects its host; there’s a soldier who tells a almost-backwards story about a lover who moves backwards in time as he moves forwards; and there’s a moving story about a famous poet who suffers from a strange psychosis that affected his ability to speak but still became the most renown author in the universe (his rise and fall from said at least.)

The book also plays with some Christian and Jewish religious themes as one pilgrim is Jewish and another character is a Catholic in a universe where the sect has dwindled to only a few thousand members. Their stories reflect their role in the society and how they see the inner workings of their cultures against the ever-changing landscape of humanity.

Hyperion approaches science fiction with a sense of awe and grandeur and, as I’ve mentioned above, time travel is a big facet of the storytelling. In fact, the pilgrims are taking a trek to a strange place on Hyperion situated with alien artifacts called the Time Tombs. One of them is directly related to the Jewish character who’s daughter—an archaeologist who studied the tombs—became caught in what’s called Merlin Sickness. She is slowly aging backwards day-by-day from the day she was affected by the Time Tombs and in the story she’s merely an infant, living out her last days as she ages backwards into nothingness and her father seeks to save her from whatever fate to give her a life again.

The plight of each of the pilgrims is very human, although eccentric and very fantastically science fiction in theme.

Each story leaves a sense of awe and wonder and sometimes resonates with a particular human mood or need from fatherhood, to childhood, to fame and fortune and loss, even loyalty, religious fervor—all of these things address the various desires and impulses all humans find themselves pulled and pressed by all their lives distilled into strangely compelling stories told by each of the pilgrims.

As soft science fiction, Hyperion is excellent for plane trips, car rides, or just falling asleep at night. While it’s a page-turner, it doesn’t require a great deal of intellectual attachment; but it will probably catch a bit of emotional attachment to the characters and their goings-on. The story is told through their eyes, their feelings and lives, and it leaves intact all the wonder that epic science fiction seeks to instill in a reader.

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When it comes to the science fiction genre, Glasshouse initially struck me as a little bit of an oddity. At it’s core, it’s a powerful self-examination of society style of speculative fiction with deep science fiction elements; but it also seemed to twist itself away from the science fiction and dove wholeheartedly and without reservation into a sort of Southern Gothic storytelling style that delivered a civilization meets Lord of the Flies.

The core story of this book is a bit of a departure from Charles Stross’s usual flamboyant technology-meets-humanity by presenting much more the humanity in total; although the entire story is inset in a technological framework, it’s really the humans who do all the moving and shaking, move the plot, and drive every fundamental element of the story.

The story starts out in the otherwise well-known hypertech and human singularity style that readers of Stross-type science fiction have gotten used to. The main character is the survivor of a series of wars that were fought over ideas more so than land or resources; in fact the last war took place by erasing knowledge from people’s minds and changing their very personalities to fit its means. In fact, most of humanity now is entirely divorced form their bodies in that they can essentially just change form anytime they want upon walking through a teleported—what’s important is the continuity of identity and that’s what the war’s viruses essentially modified.

The novel’s protagonist, Robin, is a veteran and survivor of these Censorship wars and he’s not come out without his own scars—i.e. he’s suffered some very traumas and had many of his memories erased. The virus that fought the wars is named “Curious Yellow” and he fought long and hard against it, he had to commit horrific acts that he wanted to forget; so as a result he put himself metaphorically “under the knife” and had those memories excised.

He’s also on the run.

Robin may be something of a badass, he’s not equipped to take on individuals who might otherwise see him as a threat to their existence and they’re out for his blood—or at least in this case his ultimate destruction as a person. Knowing that he may not be able to outrun them, he chooses the lesser-of-two-evils and seeks a way to hide from them by making it look as if he’s died and in the process take on a new identity. To do this he takes part in a strange anthropological experiment that would transfer his sentience out of existence and place it in a single-copy outside of the sphere of influence of his trackers.

This is where the story diverges from science fiction and becomes an examination of the human psyche and a highly anthropological almost-Hawthorneseque treatment of human behavior.

The Glasshouse experiment is one of a panopticon surveillance society recreating humanity’s “dark ages” aka 1940s to 2040s. The participants are loaded into their own roles and bodies that match people who lived during this era, given duties and jobs that fit that mold, and are quickly taken under the thumb of a tyrannical supervisor in a fashion that heavily mimics the Stanford prison experiment—in a way, the Machiavellian behavior and drama of the other experimental subjects has a strong scent of Kafka and Nietzche.

Robin is thrust into a female body and given the role of a middle-aged housewife in the late 1900s (not that far away for us) and he quickly finds himself disgruntled at the position he’s been put in. Not because of the gender-swap—he comes from a society where the concept of gender itself is something of a atavistic artifact of human nature—but being a person who doesn’t deal with authority of peer pressure well he finds the expectations of the society he’s been thrust into as unbearable.

The society that the experiment reflects is a draconian white-picket-fences meritocracy where the participants see the ability of others to perform their roles properly as reflecting on themselves. As a result, they gang up on Robin more than once and there’s obvious abuse taking place against other actors in the experiment. More than once, the protagonist is forced to reflect on his own role and ability to change the situation of others—such as a friend in the experiment who he knows is being brutally beaten by her in-experiment “husband.”

I would not suggest picking up Glasshouse if you’re looking for a junk science fiction read to burn through while sitting on a plane; it forced me to really think about the way that humans interact and how certain hierarchical and social structures can be subverted by evil and selfish motivations. It stripped away all the questions about saving-face and looking good in public and revealed a grim underbelly created by an almost sadistic overlord looking to push the participants to the breaking point.

Add that to a main character who is essentially a war survivor with his own strange hypertech PTSD—who at the beginning wasn’t very empathetic, but quickly gained me sympathy as he tried to make hard decisions.

As usual, Charles Stross creates powerful, passionate characters who find themselves trust into harrowing situations. It may dance away from the standard fare of science fiction in that the technology only lays the foundation for the story that gets told from the Glasshouse experiment; but as I said, this story is more about how people are people and less about how they adapt technology or how it adapts to them.

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For people who were huge fans of Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk work, Snow Crash, then you’ll want to move right onto The Diamond Age because it’s essentially the same world, with new people and a bit of a weirder plot to engender a sense of wonder and terror about where the world might be headed. Furthermore, the protagonist, Nell, is an awesome, female character with her own inner strengths, human flaws, and a brilliant foil to Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash to describe her world.

The second name of the book, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is reflected in a specialized type of AI book that updates itself with the development of a child it’s been paired with as a sort of educational guide. Imagine a cyberpunk version of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) bringing a young child up to speed with their literacy and other aptitudes. The Primer itself becomes the MacGuffin that ties Nell to every other major player across the plot, and also enables the story to frame itself in a fashion that highlights her moral and intellectual development from a young child to a wise young woman.

The world of Diamond Age is described as postcyberpunk, but really it’s just a cyberpunk dystopia that enmeshes the moral and social issues of massively high tech systems and the development of civilizations. Much like any other cyberpunk might describe a world cyberformed under the technology of the age, not all technology and social development brings about overarching utopias. The places and things that Nell experiences run the gamut of human experience form her own terrible abuse at the hands of her caretaker to the love she has for her brother.

One of the ways the Primer ties together the many cords of the plot is that it’s central to making Nell the focal point of how everything is leveraged. Also, the Primer is voiced by paid actors—one of whom, Miranda, slowly finds herself falling in love with Nell (although she cannot possibly know her) as she voices the stories for the book through an automated system told to Nell through the interface. In a way, this gives her a connection to Nell that is both emotional and thorough even without either of them ever meeting one another.

The second protagonist of the novel is John Percival Hakworth, a nanotech programmer rand inventor who designed the Primer; he’s pulled into a strange world of intrigue and corporate espionage after he steals a Primer for his own daughter, Fiona Hackworth. His contribution to the plot is more one of a descriptive nature that aligns and limns the political strangeness of the postcyberpunk world and the different movers and actors—and his place in it also outlines where Nell is going and how she’s going to get there.

Nell’s interaction with the Primer is an allegory for growing up from a child into a young woman. Through the story it teaches her not just how to read, how to interact socially, but also diplomacy, warfare, logic, reasoning, critical thinking, and a myriad of other life skills that one might not expect from even an AI book. It tells stories mostly set in fantasy themes with strange moral implications and barriers that she must overcome by thinking her way through them and it fashions itself by gauging what sort of thinking she’s capable of.

As the story progresses, so does her interaction with the book.

Also, for those who’ve read Snow Crash, one or two of the characters from that novel do make an appearance. See if you can identify them.

For those who read the book, and have seen the 1998 Penguin edition cover, you’ll understand this after you’ve finished reading:

I want my mouse army.

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Video games stand out as possibly the best model for UI design and how virtual reality will function in the future—point-in-fact, the entire MMO community shows us that virtual worlds are already a reality and that they can promote cooperation, leadership, and education. As a result, the fact that Halting State takes its cues from modern video games and then extends them to their logical end makes it a very amusing read. The plot of the story revolves around a heist that takes place in a video game virtual world.

That’s right: the plot of this story is all about trying to determine who pulled off the heist of a bank inside a video game.

The first thing most readers are going to notice about Halting State is that it’s written in the second person. This can be disconcerting at first—but as a storytelling mode it managed to put me in the shoes of the POV character in a way that I’ve never experienced before. Unlike first person, the second person “you” made the story feel a lot like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Each of the characters contained their own insights into the world and the delivery produces a sense of being there and being affected by the world.

The plot starts out with a massive cybercrime heist of the massively online role playing game (MMORPG) Avalon Four. The robbers managed to escape with several thousand euros worth of “prestige items” by nothing less than a band of orcs who brought in a dragon for artillery and fire support. While this sort of thing would normally not be that big of a deal (this is all digital after all) the actual heist has a lot of implications due to how the robbers managed to escape with the items and how they broke into the bank in the first place.

For example, in order to break into the central bank of Avalon Four the robbers needed to compromise a series of extremely large cryptographic keys. This becomes an important element for the plot later on when it’s discovered that Chinese hackers have managed to penetrate the entire European network backbone—including the cryptographic keys that prevent intrusions—from there the story plays a fun resonance between geeking about video games, virtual realities, and cryptography mixed with a sort of spy noir thriller.

As a book, Halting State is a lot more of a geeky science fiction thriller that spells out the story of three protagonists: a work-a-day gamer/programmer, an insurance fraud investigator, and a police detective. From the onset, the different POV characters go about their own lives following their own separate plots that inexorably drive towards each other as they uncover more and more of the underlying mystery. Sue Smith, the police detective, drives an investigation by the Edinburg authorities into general mayhem; sections with Elaine Barnaby provide a backdrop of financial investigation and a lot of interesting corporate maneuvering as she’s the fraud investigator; and finally Jack Reed who provides the truly geeky and video game aspects of the book as the programmer.

For those into Internet slang and memes, the word 0wnz0red actually appears in the book at one point to describe a thoroughly hacked server.

Also, there’s even the appearance of a zombie flashmob.

For American readers, many of the European slang will probably seem a little bit confusing; but it’s not overpowering and by in large it’s not difficult to empathize with the characters and their plight. Stross does an excellent job of painting them as real people, with real jobs, and the humor hits all the high points. For a science fiction novel, Halting State occurs in a near-future society with a lot of interesting gear floating around that mimics what can be done today (with a few things that we can’t quite yet.)

If you’re a video game player (especially if you know modern MMORPGs like World of Warcraft) this book is probably a must-read. Stross does an excellent job of melding the world of the virtual with the world of spy noir modern espionage and the writing style provides a refreshing, if strange, diversion from the normal provisions of novel writing.