Prequels and sequels: a correction

Science fiction | Vernor Vinge.

Thanks to Glenn Costello (many thanks!), I correct an error in the last few posts.

It turns out that my favourite in the series, A Fire Upon the Deep, Children of the Sky, and A Deepness in the Sky, which is Deepness, was actually written last, and is a prequel. The other books are not, as I thought, sequels.

So read them in the order above, and you'll be happier. Vinge's writing in Deepness is an order of magnitude tauter than in the previous books. I liked them in this order: Deepness best, followed by Fire and last, Children. Strangely enough, that's the order I read them in, too. But that's just coincidence.


A thought now strikes me: I guess we may, after all, find out what happened to Sherkaner Underhill.

Happiness in sheer anticipation!

First world problems of the future

Science Fiction | Vernor Vinge | Children of the Sky

So I finally finished Children of the Sky. Indeed, once I started on it again, it was unputdownable.

This is the follow up story to A Fire on the Deep, which is a sequel itself to A Deepness in the Sky. The last two books in the series could well have been published as one book, since the events follow so closely and the characters are shared between the books (except the ones that got killed in Fire, but Vinge is no George RR Martin, thank goodness, and is thrifty with the deaths). One major difference between these two is that the villains this time include humans as well (oh! the horror!).

Ravna revives the surviving children from the cold sleep boxes, and they all grow up into young adults, with no real adult supervision along the way, given how much time Ravna spends on frantically preparing to confront the Blight. And if you've read Lord of the Flies, you know what's going to happen then. Well, not really, the Tines do a good job of adult supervision, for what it's worth.

In the meantime, one of the old villains steals a dataset and ties up with a Tine in another country, a brilliant inventor, if somewhat erratic. This villain continues with worse villainy in this episode.

Ravna faces slow technology, slow progress, fast talking villains, perfidy and kidnapping. On the plus side are her loyal friends (though one is getting paranoid) and, well, loyal frenemies. Good guys turn out to be bad guys and vice versa.

The children are led astray by smooth villains who object to the available technology not being used for things they were used to in the high-tech Beyond. Complete First World Problems complaints! You want to shake sense into them. But are they wrong in their worries?

Good eventually triumphs, as in all Vinge's books, but, as usual, only squeaking through in the very last hour. (Hmph, in Deepness, they did their squeaking through in the last few pages-- we were down to single digit numbers of pages by the time the villains were vanquished-- so either Vinge is getting slow in his older age, or this story is not supposed to be as tense a read).

I dunno, you may cavil, but I liked Deepness best and I still wonder what Sherkaner Underhill got up to. There is, however, a possibility that there will be another sequel coming up. Ravna has yet to take on the Blight. On the other hand, even a major talent like Vinge may quail at taking on that encounter. He needs to exercise, eat protein-rich diets, fish oil, yoga and things before sitting down and cracking his knuckles for that one. The Blight is a Metavillain.

Next up, I will be covering my re-read of Terry Pratchett's Jingo.

Ian and the Dragon

Science Fiction | Neal Asher | Gridlinked

Like I mentioned in the last post, this book had me helplessly glued to it, and this is when it was a re-read, and also I'd had no intentions of re-reading the whole thing when I innocently picked it off the shelf to read a few pages. And this is Neal Asher's first novel. Whuff.

Gridlinked is the story of the fabulous Ian Cormac, described at one point in the book as 'the invention of fabulists', an agent for Earth Security in a universe where people travel from planet to planet via runcibles (Asher's name for the instant-elsewhere device variously called a gate, portal, etc in other fiction of the ilk). People live lives of luxury, mostly, and the tech is way up in the realms of magic. The only thing you cannot carry through a runcible is a proscribed weapon. And yet, there are those who want to leave the Polity, and drag their planet away from it. Separatists, particularly nasty multiple murderers get Cormac's goat, and he's awfully good at getting them to justice.

Early in the story, Cormac blows his cover by being too cyborg-like as a result of 30 years of being fully gridlinked with the AIs that run the cities, the runcibles, and Earth Security. Horace Blegg, the near-mythical head of ES, a 400 year old survivor of Hiroshima, suggests that he should get off the grid and take on a new assignment, to find out what caused one of the runcibles to fail, converting an incoming human into a 30 megaton bomb.

In this book, you meet the villainous separatist, Arian Pelter, who is as vicious a psychopath as you will ever meet in fiction; his sidekick, John Stanton, a boosted mercenary who prides himself on leaving separatist cells before they go fully bad, and misses the signs this time; Mr Crane, the broken Golem run by Pelter, and other assorted human villains. You also meet the dracomen, who may be alive, or not, probably created by Dragon, a series of four kilometer-diameter spheres with a touchy personality and an inexhaustible supply of lies and indirection. On Cormac's side, there are a team of four Sparkind, two of which are Golems, another Golem, a runcible expert, and assorted AIs and soldiers. Not to forget, the not-paranoid-enough smuggler captain, catadapt women and ophiadapt men. The augmentations that people do are satisfyingly futuristic, the different planets reminiscent of science fiction book covers down the ages. The spacecraft are marvels, the cars fly on anti-gravity, weird killer bugs and robotic spiders populate the shade under strange trees, and the weaponry is enough to start a movie series in itself.

All this and evocative writing too. Neal Asher actually makes you like the James Bond-ish Ian Cormac, and some of the lines are real gems. Sample:

He stretched himself out and was wondering if he would get any sleep, when sleep crept up and got him instead.

A whodunit with plenty of twists and turns, and a surprise ending.

And now, I wonder if a writer has to be ruthless with the characters, not just in setting up challenges for them, but even unto knocking them off when least expected, to get that extra 'grittiness' into fiction. You cannot be empathetic with your characters and create dyed-in-the-wool villains unless you are either psychopathic or have a ruthless grip on your imagination. At one extreme is I-will-gross-you-out-if-I-can't-horrify-you Stephen King and George RR Martin, who is inventively torturous with his characters. Certainly, these writers understand their characters, but they don't care for them, or they would not kill them so gruesomely. The taste has bitter notes all along, and sometimes strongly in the aftertaste, too. Even the chocolate in these is bitter choc. On the other end, you have Anne McCaffery, Catrina Taylor and Gord McLeod, who care deeply for their characters, and shy away from the real gore. There are tragedies and triumphs, but the overall taste is sweet. The villains are misguided and can be brought around, the aliens are understandable, and all problems can be solved if we all pull together. I know which world I'd prefer to live in, all right! And who doesn't like cake?

Yet, once in a while, your reading will go for the stronger and less expected tastes. Gridlinked is salty, pungent, with a hint of sour and an early overlay of bitter. More like eating a large burger with chilli than a bowl of chips. Satisfying.

OK, now I need to get back to Children of the Sky. Only, I'm taking a short story diversion through Aberrations, edited by Jeremy Shipp. I'm three short stories in already, which is blazing fast for a book I only downloaded today. (Oh, did I mention it's free on Amazon today?) Read it yourself, so that you can take issue with me in a few days when I comment on it. Please. :)

Multiplexing, oh, no!

Now, how did I get into this fix?

I'm reading three books together.

Children of the Sky I started by mistake, thinking it was the sequel to A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. It's not. It's a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, which is the sequel to A Deepness in the Sky. Facepalm. I was already 11 chapters into it (with attendant spoilers, wail!) before sense struck, so now I'm reading the right sequel.

And the third? That's The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley, which the resident teenager insists that I've read already since it's been lying around the house for years. This is entirely possible, which means I have the delicious situation of having completely forgotten the entire plot. Given that Varley has a completely stupendous imagination, this is a treat for me.

Reviews later. Bear with me. I have to read three of them at once.

In the meantime, in the next post, I will mutter a bit about Fatal Cure by Robin Cook.