Author: Ernest Cline

2011, Crown

Filed under: Sci-fi

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In 2044 America, the civilized world has crumbled after the end of oil. People live in squalor, in stacks of mobile homes, fighting to survive. Their only relief is an online virtual world called the OASIS. When the founder of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a mysterious quest: find three keys hidden throughout the game and win the OASIS fortune, more than a hundred billion dollars. The keys are buried in obscure, byzantine clues from the culture of the founder’s childhood, the 1980s.

As you might expect, millions of citizens devote their lives to unraveling the answers that will lead them to unfathomable wealth, but after years of searching, nobody has found even a single key, and the world has largely forgotten about the contest. Until, that is, a broke kid named Wade Watts finally finds the first key, and the game is back on.

It’s hard to imagine a novel featuring more layers of nerdity than Ready Player One. A nerdy kid plays a nerdy videogame in which he solves a nerdy quest by knowing and doing the most excruciatingly nerdy things.

Even the prose exudes nerdity, with its careful attention to meaningless details (like how many experience points Wade’s avatar gets each time he solves a puzzle).

Unfortunately, unlike other popular nerds (Patton Oswalt, Simon Pegg, the xkcd guy), Ernest Cline is not funny, and so following the personality-free Wade can be quite dull at times. He exhaustively relates each and every tiny detail, like a LARPer describing the minutiae of a puzzle quest.

I closed the IM window and checked the time. I still had about half an hour until class started. I grinned and tapped a small door icon at the edge of my display, then selected Aech’s chat room from my list of favorites.

In this way, Wade’s narration often reads like someone describing the process of web-surfing to a blind man. Not the content, even, but the “I’m clicking on this button, now I’m scrolling through a list” steps of procedure. …
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Author: China Mieville

2011, Del Rey

Filed under: Sci-Fi

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Embassytown is the second Mieville book I’ve read, and I liked it much more than the first—although I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve become accustomed to his style, or because his sensibility better suits this plot and premise.

Previously, I read The City & The City, an ill-conceived detective novel set in a weird city, undone by the incomprehensible motivations of its characters.

The motives of the characters in Embassytown likewise resist understanding. That’s because, as I’ve finally realized (or perhaps just accepted), China Mieville doesn’t give a shit about his characters, or why they do what they do. Mieville only cares about the weird ideas he dreams up; he only gives his novels plots and his characters names to make something like a canvas, on which his weird ideas can be displayed.

That means that if you look for narrative art in his books, you’ll be sorely disappointed, as I was when I read City. But if you approach his work as conceptual art, you might find it enjoyable, even if it’s largely meaningless. That’s what I found this second time around. …
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Author: James S.A. Corey

2011, Orbit

Filed under: Sci-Fi

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In the middle of the solar system, a rattletrap ice-hauling spaceship called the Canterbury lurches to a stop so its shuttle can investigate a distress call from a dead ship. James Holden, the Canterbury‘s second-in-command, leads the shuttle team. As soon as the shuttle docks with the wreck, a stealth ship uncloaks, blows up the Canterbury, and hightails it.

Holden broadcasts the details of this deception to the entire solar system, and includes the fact that the fake transponder the Canterbury responded to—the bait in the trap—bears the insignia of the Martian Navy. And that’s how you accidentally start a war.

Meanwhile, on a space station in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, an alcoholic cop named Miller gets tapped to investigate the disappearance of a rich man’s daughter. He soon finds that she had something to do with the Canterbury‘s destruction, and his fate becomes tied to Holden’s.

For 300 pages, Leviathan Wakes is grade-A science fiction: precise, entertaining, imaginative, and adventuresome. It flags a bit down the stretch with a relatively silly major conflict, and then it gets boring when the third act turns out to be one big drawn-out fight scene. However, if you’ve been looking for an engrossing, classically molded space opera epic, this is a solid one. …
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