CBR16 Book 14: "Illuminae" by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Page count: 602 pages

Rating: 5 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo: An epistolary novel

CBR16 Sweet Books: Binge (I have already bought the next two books in the series in paperback, so I can read all of them as soon as possible.)

Official book description:

Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the worst thing she'd ever been through. That was before her planet was invaded. Now, with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra are forced to fight their way onto one of the evacuating craft, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.

But the warship could be the least of their problems. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet's AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their biggest threat; and nobody in charge will say what's really going on. As Kady plunges into a web of data hacking to get to the truth, it's clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: Ezra.

Kady is a talented hacker and is fully aware that the evacuated passengers aren't being told much of anything. She is determined to find out the truth of what is going on, especially after the AI of the leading evacuation ship, AIDAN, blows one of the other two up unexpectedly. Naturally, the remaining ship's crew are rather nervous about the incident being repeated and the AI needs to be shut down until they can figure out why it acted so erratically. Ezra is recruited as a fighter pilot, working to defend the evacuation fleet, not exactly a job without significant risks.

As Kady becomes more and more isolated, and the losses really start affecting her, her illegal communication with Ezra becomes one of the things that keep her going. Neither of them has anyone else significant left in their lives, and it becomes clear that the reasons why Kady dumped Ezra in the first place become very insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and now they would just like to be reunited, before they quite possibly die. 

As the back of the book says, the novel is "Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, schematics, military files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more". I am very glad I got the paperback from the library, I'm genuinely not sure how in the world this book would work in audio, and I don't think I would have found it as engrossing a read on an e-reader screen. There were sections where I literally had to keep turning the book sideways or on its head to be able to read everything. It's a very interesting take on the epistolary format. 

I can absolutely see why this book wouldn't be a 5-star read for some people. It was a bit slow to catch my interest in the beginning, but since it's not divided into chapters like a traditional book, but interview transcripts, memos, chat logs, and the like, it's very easy to get tempted to read just a little bit more, since each individual section is so short. Once things really started escalating, I had trouble putting the book down. I stayed up until far too late o'clock on a work night just to finish it (and had to actually peek at the ending about halfway through the book because all the tension was going to kill me if I didn't know how it all turned out). So to me, this was a five-star read, even though some of the characterisation probably could have been deeper, and parts of the book were pure horror, and really upsettingly graphic when it came to the violence perpetrated by those afflicted with the virus. 

I have now bought this book for my keeper shelf, along with the two sequels, if they're even half as gripping as this one, I want physical copies of them for my very own. Also, having read the first one in a physical format, I'm not even sure it would be possible to get all the necessary information if you read them as an e-book or listened to it in audio. 

Judging a book by its cover: The reds and oranges are very eye-catching and I'm not entirely sure what the cover is supposed to show, but I think it might be a firestorm, suggesting either the original attack on Kady and Ezra's home world or the subsequent explosion of one of the evacuation ships. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 3: "Dance with the Devil" by Kit Rocha

Page count: 416 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

After his father died, Rafael "Rafe" Morales basically sold himself to TechCorps and agreed to become a technologically enhanced supersoldier, so he could make enough money to keep his widowed mother and younger siblings safe. He didn't really know what signing away his life would entail, and given the choice again, he probably would have chosen differently. He hasn't been able to see them for years, certainly not since he and his team, the Silver Devils, had to fake their own deaths to get away from their cruel superiors.

Unlike Rafe, Danijela "Dani" Volkova didn't really have external pressures that made her sign up with TechCorps. She was just curious and driven, and once their scientists had experimented sufficiently on her, she became super fast, agile, and graceful and lost the ability to feel pain, at all. This made her the perfect elite bodyguard for the rich and powerful, until she just couldn't handle the cruelty and corruption she was witness to and broke away. She joined Nina and Maya to become one of the mercenary librarians of Atlanta. Dani feels like TechCorps turned her into a monster. She appreciates the love that her chosen sisters and the former supersoldiers who share their lives offer her, but deep down she knows she doesn't deserve it. 

Since their very first meeting, when Dani may have "accidentally" stabbed Rafe a little bit, the chemistry between them has been off the charts. But Rafael doesn't want a quick fling, Dani doesn't do long-term commitment, and neither is willing to risk screwing up their new big, unusual family unit with relationship drama. Keeping everything casual and platonic becomes a lot more difficult when the two have to go undercover among the rich and deplorable of Atlanta. After the death of Tobias Richter, the VP of Security for TechCorps, and the one who sat with most of the power, the organisation is desperately scrambling to maintain control, and our enhanced heroes and heroines have decided that it's time to start fighting back. 

Having come into unexpected wealth at the end of the previous book, Maya is using all of her considerable resources and brains, her wealth of sensitive information burned into her brain after growing up in the loving arms of TechCorps and learning a lot of its dirty secrets, as well as calling in all the favours from her vast network of informants and allies. It's one such ally, a head researcher at TechCorps, whom Rafe and Dani are trying to contact when they go undercover, as a married couple. Once on the mission, they not only discover that Rafe's little sister is in terrible danger, but it also becomes impossible for them to keep their hands off each other. 

This is the third and probably final (there is a suggestion at the end of the epilogue in this one that there may be new dangers facing our intrepid band of heroes, but it seems like the author duo has moved on to new projects now) novel in the Mercenary Librarians series. As such, it's not the best place to start. This might very well not be an almost five-star read to someone else but as the end chapter of all that has been established in the previous two books, with all the seeds sown and the principal cast, as well as the various supporting characters, joining together to launch a full-scale revolution, I loved this book. The romance between Dani and Rafe has been teased from the beginning and didn't disappoint. 

Both Dani and Rafe got turned into lethal weapons by TechCorps, but Rafael grew up in a loving family and always knew that the sacrifices he made were for them. Dani was rejected by her parents once they realised the choices she had made, and was honed into a ruthless killing machine by the scientists. She is fiercely loyal and has vast capacities for love and emotion, all of which she is worthy of, but takes her quite some time to come to terms with. 

I loved this book, and its action-packed and thrilling finale, where the downtrodden of Atlanta join with our protagonists to kick ass and take names, in order to secure a better future, free of the dominance of TechCorps and their controlling ways. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover for this one at least has slightly more of a sci-fi feel than the last one, but it's still a pretty generic image and I certainly would never have picked up this book from the cover alone. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Books 2: "The Devil You Know" by Kit Rocha

Page count: 416 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Maya used to be Marjorie Chevalier, but had to change her identity after she escaped the evil super scientists at TechCorps, where she was trained as a data courier (basically a human hard drive), with her senses specially enhanced to remember flawlessly everything she hears, reads, sees, hears and experiences. She used to work for one of the Vice Presidents of TechCorps who was secretly orchestrating a rebellion, However, her boss (also the only maternal figure Maya ever knew) was caught and executed, and Maya had to be smuggled to safety. 

She found that safety with Nina, now one of the sisters she never had. Along with the lethal Dani, they have been working to help the residents of post-apocalyptic Atlanta by passing on free information (books, videos, music) and technical know-how. They also occasionally go off on adventures to recover more books and resources. After the events of the previous books, their little found family has expanded a lot, with the former supersoldiers from the Silver Devils squad having settled down in a warehouse next to the librarians' headquarters. The group is hired to retrieve what turns out to be a genetically modified child, and it turns out that Rainbow (which is the name the child chooses for herself) is not the only one. Since Maya doesn't have super speed or strength, she stays back home holding the fort, accompanied by Grey, the former sniper of the Silver Devils, who can't be trusted on a tense mission since his body might betray him.

All the Silver Devils have technical implants that have enhanced their senses. Supersoldiers like them don't normally have a very long lifespan, but in rare cases, their bodies might start rejecting the implant after decades of being used to them. This is what is happening to Grey now. He can suddenly be struck with seizures and an operation to replace the implant has a less than 5% chance of survival, even if they could find a surgeon skilled enough to perform the operation. So Grey is accepting that he doesn't have long to live. One of the things he wants to do with his final days is make sure Maya has the skills and confidence to defend herself and keep herself safe. She's always been told that she needs to be careful not to overload her brain, or she can pretty much short-circuit, but Grey suspects that she's limiting herself out of fears told to her to control her and keep her from reaching her full potential. He shows her that not only is she an absolute wizard with all things technical, but her perfect recall is a superpower in itself, if not as physically intimidating as those of her chosen sisters.

There is a very strong attraction between Maya and Grey, however, the only man Maya ever loved before was literally tortured to death in front of her in an attempt to get her to reveal the secrets buried in her brain after her boss was executed. She's also prone to sensory overload and doesn't really know how she'd react in a physically overwhelming situation, like having sex. Letting herself fall for a man who's dying is bound to lead to heartbreak, but not acting on the attraction before it's too late might be a bigger mistake than keeping her distance.

While Maya and the Silver Devils all had very skillful people hiding their tracks and faking their deaths (complete with falsified bodies with their DNA planted), Tobias Richter, the VP of Security at TechCorps is a ruthless and deeply driven man, convinced (rightly so) that he can find them if he searches hard enough. When a video from a farmer's market surfaces, proving to him that his quarries are still alive, Maya and Grey's days together might be numbered sooner than they think. 

I enjoyed Deal with the Devil, which introduced the world and all these characters to each other. Now the super soldiers and the high-tech murder ladies all live together as a big, ruthlessly efficient, and deadly family, doing their best to right wrongs and improve their local community. Maya has always felt like the weakest of the group, and the lies to her by her former boss to keep her from showing too much of her excellence to Tech Corps means she hasn't been able to reach her true potential until Grey comes along and makes her see how truly remarkable she is, even in a dangerous situation. She's not just brains and perfect recall. Their romance develops slowly since Grey is likely to die soon, and Maya has some understandable emotional scars from her first and only romantic relationship so far.

The villain in this book is a complete psycho, and once he discovers that Maya and the Silver Devils are alive, he lures them into a trap to get his clutches on Maya. Of course, Maya is no longer a delicate flower raised in a sheltered environment and beats Tobias Richter at his own game. Things look dicey for Grey for a while (who to be fair already thought he was dying, so wanted to save Maya with the grandest of gestures), but this is a romance, and our brave, self-sacrificing hero doesn't actually end the book dead. 

By the end of this book, our altruistic heroes and heroines have some difficult choices to make. Their attempts to stay hidden from TechCorps have clearly failed, and a confrontation is inevitable. Are they ready to go to war?

Judging a book by its cover: This is about as generic as covers go. Nothing about this says post-apocalyptic action adventure with kick-ass murder ladies and supersoldier dudes. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR14 Book 20: "Shards of Earth" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Page count: 558 pages

Audio book length: 18 hrs 43 mins

Rating: 4 stars

 

CBR14 Bingo: Cold (the majority of this novel is set in space, which is famously very cold)

 

Official book description:

Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade his mind in the war. And one of humanity’s heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.

Eighty years ago, Earth was destroyed by an alien enemy. Many escaped, but millions more died. So mankind created enhanced humans ­such as Idris - who could communicate mind-to-mind with our aggressors. Then these ‘Architects’ simply disappeared and Idris and his kind became obsolete.

Now, Idris and his crew have something strange, abandoned in space. It’s clearly the work of the Architects – but are they really returning? And if so, why? Hunted by gangsters, cults, and governments, Idris and his crew race across the galaxy as they search for answers. For they now possess something of incalculable value, and many would kill to obtain it.

Shards of Earth was the July book club pick of my fantasy/sci-fi book club, and unusual for me, I had actually finished the book BEFORE the meeting. Right? I was as shocked as I'm sure you were. The general consensus of the people at the meeting who had finished the book (most of them) was that it was entertaining, but that the beginning of the book was rather slow and info-dumpy and that the plot narrative didn't necessarily benefit from each new section of the book arresting the plot momentum by going into a flashback, giving the reader background info relevant to this planet/section of space. A couple of people were especially annoyed by this, I think I'd gotten used to it by the third time the book changes location.

As is the case with a lot of sci-fi adventure, we follow a ragtag bunch of space farers, some of the more prominent being Idris, a man who was surgically and genetically modified early in the war against the huge and unfathomable Architects and for reasons I'm sure will be revealed in a later book in the series, has neither slept nor aged since his surgery. Idris and the others who were modified during the war were called Intermediaries, shortened to 'Ints' as the fighting wore on. Their mission was to try to telepathically connect with the giant, destructive moon-sized Architects in the hope to stop them from turning inhabited planets and settlements into abstract works of art, devoid of life. Idris was part of group of Ints who actually managed to mind meld with an Architect eighty years ago, and as a result, the massive alien disappeared, no Architects seen or heard from since. 

The surviving Ints also had an unprecedented ability to navigate ships through space, managing to find paths through the Void that others can't. This makes them extremely prized pilots, and caused the institute who created the first Ints to continue their experiments even after the war, creating in effect an indentured slave class forced to work as pilots until their brains give in. Idris is one of extremely few original Ints left, and bound to no one. To make sure he doesn't get kidnapped or stolen into slavery, he travels with his own lawyer, who can get him out of any scrape. They both reside the salvage vessel The Vulture God with a number of colourful rogues. 

Our other major POV character in the story is Solace of the Partheni. The Partheni are elite female soldiers, all genetically engineered by a scientist shortly before the start of the Architect War. They proved to be extremely useful in fighting the Architects and Solace was there when Idris and others took on an Architect in the final battle of the war. She hasn't aged noticeably either, but only because she's been kept in suspended animation. Now her superiors have need of her and a rather sensitive job they need her to perform, and Solace will need to locate and reunite with Idris.

Solace and the crew of the Vulture God find something very unexpected on what was supposed to be a routine salvage mission. Now they seem to be hunted through space by various groups of space mafia and criminals, as well as government officials and Idris can sense very worrying things in the Void that suggest that the decades of peace may be coming to an end. 

I listened to this book in audio and was surprised to find that the narrator is Sophie Aldred. To most people, that name means very little. But married as I am to the biggest Doctor Who nerd of my acquaintance, to me, Sophie Aldred will always be Ace, the Seventh Doctor's companion (who famously beat up a dalek with a baseball bat in one story). Because she was the main companion on Doctor Who when my husband was a child and first watched the show, he's obviously especially fond of that era, and I've seen pretty much all the stories with her. I've also listened to a lot of audio dramas with her, because we don't play at being Doctor Who fans in our household. Big Finish Audios are an important supplemental source of stories. So it was really strange to me, and probably took me about an hour or so of the novel to get used to Ace telling me the story, except of course, she wasn't Ace at all. Aldred is in fact a very good narrator, who manages to give the various characters, no matter what origin (there are quite a few aliens and cybernetic characters). I suspect listening to book 2 will be less of an adjustment. 

This was my first novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It clearly won't be the last. 

 

Judging a book by its cover: There was some discussion during our book club about the cover of the novel. About half of the members think it was a bit too generically sci-fi, especially with the cold shades of blue and a lot of black with some scattered spacecraft. I personally think it's quite cool, especially with the planet in the lower right corner in the process of being opened up and rearranged by the Architects. The second cover is mostly in shades of red, and my bet is going to be that the third novel in the trilogy is dominated by green.

 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.  

#CBR12 Book 27: "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 5 stars

Official book description:
DAY ONE
The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb.
News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.

WEEK TWO
Civilization has crumbled.

YEAR TWENTY
A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.

But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

STATION ELEVEN
Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'.

Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, this is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world. 

This was our very first Cannonball Book Club pick back in 2015, and I read and reviewed the book back then too. My original review can be found here. It took me a while back then to decide that I actually wanted to read the book for myself, and I'm not going to lie, re-reading it while a pandemic swept from Asia towards Europe and the USA, was making me a bit nervous. Looking back at the dates when I re-read this book, it was exactly during the time when Norway literally shut down, when the most drastic measures in post-World War II society were implemented, all over the course of a few days. I began my re-read of this on the 12th of March, on my way to work. By the afternoon, we'd been told that the nurseries, schools and universities, not to mention pretty much all major businesses, would be closed until further notice, and everyone was encouraged to just remain indoors, in a kind of pre-quarantine.

Of course, I'm reviewing the book some three months later, and while the pandemic is currently under control in certain parts of the world, it's still spreading wildly and terrifyingly fast in other parts of the globe. While I would love to believe the hopeful views on humanity and survival that are explored in this novel, the current news cycle shows that most people are short-sighted, egotistical, self-centred and careless. It's boring and difficult, not to mention very inconvenient to shelter in place and stay away from people for months. It's much nicer if you can just go about your business instead.  It's hot and uncomfortable to wear a mask to protect others, so a whole bunch of people are just not going to do that, despite all the factual evidence that we could massively halt the spread of the virus if everyone (especially the ones who don't feel sick, but may be asymptomatic carriers) just wore a face mask, washed their hands a lot and tried to keep their distance when out and about.

Station Eleven is a science fiction novel, it's set in a post-apocalyptic society, but it is nevertheless a hopeful and uplifting read. I don't think Emily St. John Mandel would dream of the situations that Covid-19 has created world-wide back when she wrote her book, and as I said, right now, the things that seem the most far fetched and fictional to me, are how well the "Fifteen years later" societies are managing. Of course, we're currently in the middle of "Year One" of this scenario, so perhaps, in the future, when a terrifyingly tragic percentage of the population has died (even if it's not 99%, like in this book), people will again focus mainly on re-building communities and re-discovering art and beauty and togetherness.

This wasn't supposed to be quite such a depressing whinge about how bafflingly selfish a lot of people currently are, but rather a review of my re-read of the book. In my mind, I'd built up the bits I disliked, with the 'Prophet', into a much larger part of the story. So much of the book looks back on the lives of a lot of the people before the Georgia flu hit and subsequently make us care when they are either killed by the flu themselves or lose other loved ones from the illness. It's still a wonderful book, and I'm glad we revisited it for Book Club.

Judging a book by its cover: I own three copies of this book. An e-book copy, an Audible audiobook and the UK paperback copy, which I was gifted in a Cannonball Book Exchange. This is the cover of the paperback I have, which seems extra timely now that an actual pandemic is sweeping the world and we saw that in places where people were forced to isolate during the lockdown, wild animals really did end up roaming the urban streets, undisturbed by people. So the deer facing the reader among the high rises of a city doesn't seem as strange as it may have once done. It doesn't take long for nature to start reclaiming the space we take up.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR4 Book 2: "Ship Breaker" by Paolo Bacigalupi

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: January 4th, 2012
Date finished: January 6th, 2012

So I saw this book mentioned in rave reviews all over the internets in the last year, and as I enjoy young adult quite a bit, I figured it might be worth checking out. I have to agree with what a lot of people are saying - young adult novels have certainly changed since I was a teenager. The plots tended to feature your teen pregnancies, and eating disorders, and homosexuality, and drug abuse, and AIDS and stuff. There were no sparkly vampires, or morally ambiguous fairies, or werewolves, or apprentice witches of the Discworld, or magical wizards schools, or Greek or Egyptian demi-gods, or criminal masterminds, and certainly no post apocalyptic future where most things have gone completely to hell, like in The Hunger Games or this one. Seriously, young adults today don't know they're born, they have so much good stuff to choose from.

Nailer works as a ship breaker, crawling through the tiny spaces of beached, rusting hulks, trying to scrounge enough copper wire to make the daily quota, so he and his work crew can eat for another day. His mum is dead, his dad is a calculating, deadly drug fiend who rarely has a good word for him. He's fiercely loyal to his work crew, and fears the day when he grows too big to work stripping copper, as he may not be big and strong enough to get work on a crew stripping heavy things like iron. He watches the sleek, clean, elegant clipper ships that sail by, and hopes that some day he'll find enough oil or gold to buy himself out of his dismal existence, but has very little hope of anything ever changing for him.

A few days after nearly drowning in a room filled with oil, a terrible storm hits the beach where Nailer and the other ship breakers live in shacks. When out with his crew mate Pima (whose mother is the only adult who seems to really care for him), he finds a stranded clipper ship, blown onto the beach by the storm. Inside the ship, they find enough luxuries to buy their freedom and set them up for the rest of their lives, but they also find a beautiful and clearly very rich girl, in the rubble. When trying to strip her jewelry from her, they discover that she's still alive, and have to decide whether the kill her, and keep their new found riches for themselves, or save her.

Due to his recent near death experience, Nailer can't bring himself to let Pima kill the girl humanely. They decide to rescue the girl, who assures them that her father will reward them handsomely for her return. But Nailer's psychotic father and his crew of equally dangerous low-lifes have also discovered the wreck, and want to sell her to the rival band who want to take over her father's business. Can Nailer go against the only family he has left, and abandon everything he's ever known, to risk his life and possibly his future for a disdainful stranger?

Bacigalupi paints an all too convincing picture of our future in Ship Breaker. The ice caps have melted, the sea levels have risen. Pollution and reliance on fossil fuels have made much of the world uninhabitable. The gap between the haves and the have nots has become almost insurmountable, with most people scavenging whatever they can find, including blood and organs, to sell to the wealthy corporations. Terrible hurricanes ravage the coasts of what used to be America, and many of the big cities are under water.

Nailer's life is awful, and you can't fault him for dreaming about something better. He lives in a harsh reality, where you are loyal to your blood-sworn crew, and betrayal is punished swiftly and brutally. Without a crew at your back, you are nothing. Every character is beautifully fleshed out, with very little effort, and the world building is excellent. The descriptions Bacigalupi uses are stark, sparing and very effective. There's quite a lot of violence and brutality, and the action rarely slows down for long.

I wanted to love the book, but something I can't quite put my finger on, held me back. Maybe it's just the sci-fi aspect. For some reason, I have a lot less time for science fiction than fantasy. I just can't seem to like it as much. This was a very good book, but maybe all the glowing reviews had raised my expectations up too high. Still, it's well worth a read, and people without a strange aversion to fantasy might enjoy it even more than I.